Description: When successful industrialist Alfred Dunstan arrives in the Lake District to build his family a mansion, it seems to fifteen-year-old Chrissie Ascham that something new, exciting, and more than a little unnerving has entered her life. For nothing in her carefully governed childhood - not even an amateur botanist mother or an abstracted Renaissance-obsessed father - has prepared her for the sheer raw energy of the Dunstans. Before long, she has been drawn into a world dominated by Alfred's tyranny and his implacable war with his son, Jack - not to mention his daughter Beatrice's passionate lust for the good things in life and the childlike gentleness of his neglected and beautiful wife, Letty. A trip to view the cultural glories of Venice turns into a sensual awakening - not only for unworldly, reflective Chrissie, but for Letty Dunstan also - setting off a spiraling sequence of passion, tragedy, and betrayal involving wartime treachery, slow and seductive blackmail, and thirty of the world's most fabulous pearls...during the last sultry, unheeding summer before the outbreak of the Great War.

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