Marilyn Johnson

In 1901, a middle-class schoolboy whose parents are working abroad spends his summer in Bedfordshire with his great-uncle Silas. Though 60 years old, Silas relishes life—he’s a womanizer, drinker, and a poacher. At the prompting of his long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs. Betts, he takes on the occasional odd job.

Berlin, Germany, 1935. The day Karl Weiss, a Jewish painter, and Inga Helms, a Christian woman, marry, is the one in which both of them and the entire Weiss family are caught up in the maelstrom of the Nazi regime, the storms of World War II and the horrors of the criminal Final Solution, the Holocaust, the Shoah; while Erik Dorf, an ambitious lawyer, undertakes his fall into hell at the hands of the sinister Reinhard Heydrich.

At the Castle of Gormenghast, the Groan family has ruled with dusty ceremony for more than seventy generations. A clever and ambitious new kitchen boy, Steerpike, begins to insinuate himself into the affections of Lady Fuchsia Groan and to murder his way to power.