The End of the House of Alard

December 1918. Peter Alard walks through the gates of Conster Manor for the first time since the trenches, and nothing is as he left it. The war has ended, but the real battle has only begun: against mounting debts, crumbling traditions, and a family that expects him to save them through a marriage of convenience rather than love. Sheila Kaye-Smith writes with devastating clarity about the slow collapse of the English gentry, the price of maintaining appearances when the foundation has rotted away entirely. Peter finds himself torn between Stella Mount, a woman without fortune but with something far more precious, and the crushing weight of duty to a lineage that may no longer deserve his sacrifice. Set against the wind-swept Sussex downs that Kaye-Smith knew better than any writer of her generation, this is a novel about what survives when everything else falls away. The prose carries the ache of autumn, the sense of an era breathing its last. For readers who cherish the great English country house novels, who understand that decline can be as compelling as triumph.