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.

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.

Be tempted by the forbidden in this sexy Regency… Her new employer… Is the only man to tempt her! One could never be prepared for a Duke,thinks governess Mary McLaren upon meeting her imposing new employer, Samuel, the Duke of Westmere. There to tame his disobedient children, she finds their widower father is cold and forbidding, but with a strength she finds oddly reassuring. She’s escaped a brutal past in Scotland and should steer clear of entanglements. If only she didn’t crave the forbidden intimacy of their moments alone… From Harlequin Historical: Your romantic escape to the past.

Color cover illustration J14 pages of new art work JRed letter Self-pronouncing text Illustrated Gift box Blue page edging