Gareth Lloyd lives a life of quiet obscurity, toiling in the Docklands by day and living the life of a recluse by night. Fate has forced his return to London after many years abroad, and soon Gareth finds he can no longer repress the childhood horrors which haunt him-memories which worsen when he receives shocking news. The Duke of Warneham has died suspiciously and without an heir, save for a distant and long-forgotten cousin. Now Gareth must take on a burden he never wished for . . . and that includes the newly widowed duchess.

The Duke's Children is a novel about sorrow and loss, and about a parent s pained discovery that our children inevitably grow to love us less than we love them.

He was alone in the world, and there was no one of whom he could ask a question. After the sudden death of his wife, two years after he has left office as Prime Minister, the Duke of Omnium must become deeply involved with his children for the first time. They vex him enormously: with school expulsions, vast gambling debts, and what he considers to be calamitous romantic attachments. He tries to compel them to do what he wants, but they are not so easy to manage. Even when his eldest child and heir, Lord Silverbridge, makes him proud by embarking upon a political career, the Duke grapples with heartache. For Silverbridge becomes a Conservative rather than a Liberal, flouting the family tradition. The relationship between father and son is drawn with remarkable subtlety, and the book as a whole becomes a piercing, yet often humorous, exploration of change: how both the young and the old resist, tolerate, or embrace it. Trollope cut roughly 65,000 words, at a vulnerable moment in his career, to get the novel published, but concluded rapidly that he had made a grievous error. After a painstaking reconstruction by a team of researchers, The Duke's Children, the final book in Trollope's famed Palliser series, can now be read the way he first intended. It is a masterpiece of Victorian fiction.

AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN UNDER HIS ROOF…! Left orphaned and destitute, Miss Sophie Langford had no choice but to throw herself on the mercy of her mother’s family, namely the Duke of Belfont. But instead of the elderly gentleman she had envisaged, she was confronted by the fifth duke, James, a most eligible bachelor. The presence of Sophie’s widowed sister enabled James to take Sophie into his household, although he little guessed what he had let himself in for. Sophie was quite unlike any other lady of his acquaintance—she certainly had no hesitation about speaking her mind! So why did he find her so damnably attractive?