Roger Humphries

Fallodon Roger Humphries

It is 1917 and the Kaiser's armies have nearly overrun the whole of Europe while Britain looks on, besieged inside her island borders, protected by the Royal Navy. After a devastating nervous breakdown, priggish young lawyer Arthur Blanchard seeks to recuperate by working as secretary to Sir Edward Grey at Fallodon Hall, Grey's isolated country house on the wet and windswept Northumberland coast. Instead of finding peace and quiet, Blanchard is thrust into a hotbed of bitterness, deceit and betrayal as the strange marriage of Grey and his wife Lady Dorothy begins to unravel. Dorothy has been paralysed and confined to her bed since she was thrown from her trap in 1906 by a nervous horse. She knows very well that Grey has always covered up his resentment at having to sacrifice his career as Foreign Secretary to care for her. He is seething with frustration at the appalling job he thinks his former friends in the government have made of British foreign policy and the conduct of the war. How differently he would have done things! Blanchard is gradually smitten with the disarming and bewitching Dorothy. By trusting her, he becomes an unsuspecting accomplice in a secret game of revenge she is playing against her husband. Dorothy's increasingly candid revelations about the Hall's dark secret build up to a shattering finale where everything Blanchard thinks he knows is turned on its head. This 'what-if' historical novel should appeal particularly to readers who enjoyed Philip Roth's alternative history The Plot Against America or Robert Harris's Fatherland, as well as to non-fiction readers interested in the sort of counterfactual historical speculation of Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War. "Lyrically written as Blanchard's own memoir and wonderfully atmospheric, with a brilliantly Gothic setting, FALLODON imagines how the course of history might have changed had one woman lived, instead of died. Mingling politics with a complex and emotional human story, this is in my opinion a very accomplished first novel." Katie Green, Editor, Daniel Goldsmith Associates, Literary Consultants