Susan Howatch

"The time is 1940. Jonathan Darrow is an Anglican priest when he receives a shattering vision and knows he must leave the monastery that has been his home for seventeen years. As he plunges into the temptations of the real world, a crisis sends him into the labyrinth of his past to pluck out the buried truth beneath the deceptions he has been living through." --Publisher description.

Charles Ashworth, the bishop of Starbridge, is a man of great accomplishment, confidence, and conviction. Within the Church, he has earned a reputation as a strong, efficient, no-nonsense bishop. Outside the Church, he is known as “Anti-Sex Ashworth.” But when Ashworth's beloved wife dies, a profound crisis of his faith begin. unexpectedly and with brutal force. As bereavement overwhelms his spiritual equilibrium, his strict morality is quickly...

The dynastic history of three generations of an English/Irish family and the great house that obsesses them.

The life of a beautiful, ambitious Englishwoman becomes intertwined with the fate of an American banking family.

This family saga traces the fortunes of the Van Zales of New York City from post Word War II through the 1960's. Cornelius Van Zale, czar of a Wall Street investment bank, lords it over his family, friends and underlings. His cut-throat tactics have far-reaching adverse effects on everyone around him, particularly on his vulnerable daughter, Vicky.

Neville, at age forty one, faces personal and professional ruin as his obsession with society's darling, Dido, becomes a web of deceit and threatens the picture-perfect world he has created.

In 1963 the provincial English town of Starbridge is challenged by a new social and sexual freedom.

Claire Sullivan leaves New York and travels to Paris and London to search for her younger sister after a disturbing telephone call.