The Celebrity at Home

Meet Tempe Taylor, eight years old and already wiser than the adults around her. Her father George is a famous author, which means the family home is forever flooded with visitors eager to bask in his celebrity. But Tempe sees what her mother and sister refuse to acknowledge: the gap between her father's public brilliance and his private cruelties. Written in 1904 from a child's perspective, this is a quietly devastating portrait of Edwardian family life, where fame masks dysfunction and childhood is a country of disappointments adults refuse to take seriously. Tempe narrates with the deadpan candor of a budding satirist, recording her family's absurdities while yearning for a life she's convinced will be freer, truer. Violet Hunt, drawing on her own upbringing in Victorian London literary circles, gives us a protagonist who is funny, wounded, and fiercely alive. This is domestic realism before the term existed, seen through eyes too honest to look away.