The Other Family

From the superb storyteller and quintessential women's fiction author Joanna Trollope comes a moving and wonderfully observed new novel about two families who must confront love and loss as an inheritance hangs in the balance. The trouble with dying is that you're not around anymore to explain what you meant to the people who love you… Richie Rossiter, a crooner and piano man still popular with his loyal fans, is anyone's idea of a lucky man. In his forties, he abandoned his first wife and son in Newcastle for a young woman who believed she could bring him stardom in the south. Not only does Chrissie rejuvenate his career, she gives him twenty-three years of happy domestic life and three lovely daughters. But then he dies suddenly, and at his funeral Chrissie and her daughters cross paths with Richie's other family for the very first time. And the uneasy truce that has held over the years between Richie's past and his present loves breaks down into open animosities, fanned by certain bequests he has made and certain secret loyalties he has kept. Grief, loss, jealousy and love rewrite the relationships of both families in ways Richie never could have imagined. From the Hardcover edition.