Ashenden: Stories of a House - Elizabeth Wilhide

Written by Elizabeth Wilhide
Read by Carole Boyd
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
Publisher: Audible, 2014

Wilhide, an interior design and architecture writer, delivers a historical exploration of an 18th-century English estate house in a series of short stories.

A novel about people, a country estate, and living history

“The house contains time. Its walls hold stories. Births and deaths, comings and goings, people and events passing through. . . . For now, however, it lies suspended in a kind of emptiness, as if it has fallen asleep or someone has put it under a spell. This silence won’t last: can’t last. Something will have to be done.”

When brother and sister Charlie and Ros discover that they have inherited their aunt’s grand English country house, they must decide if they should sell it. As they survey the effects of time on the estate’s architectural treasures, a narrative spanning two and a half centuries unfolds. We meet those who built the house, lived in it and loved it, worked in it, and those who would subvert it to their own ends. Each chapter is skillfully woven into the others so that the storylines of the upstairs and downstairs characters and their relatives and descendants intertwine to make a rich tapestry.

A beautifully written novel full of humor, heart, and poignancy, Ashenden is an evocative portrait of a house that becomes a character as compelling as the people who inhabit it.

Kirkus Reviews….”Architecture, social shifts, private lives and next generations are the running themes, with Ashenden Park, a magnificent Palladian stately home, as the beating heart and central location of the sequence of vignettes that starts in 2010, with the reluctant inheritance of the neglected pile by a brother and sister, and then shifts back to 1775 and the arrival of the golden Bath stone from which it will be built. Wilhide introduces Ashenden’s architect and his gifted apprentice, who is killed in an accident during construction, and then the various owners: a spendthrift noble; a thrifty haberdasher; a property developer. But the servants are included too, the pregnant chambermaids and unfairly dismissed housekeepers. Wilhide brings freshness and emotional depth to the snapshots and links them astutely. “.