From the author of the bestselling A Reliable Wife comes a dramatic,
passionate tale of a glamorous Southern debutante who marries for money
and ultimately suffers for love--the literary love-child of William
Faulkner and Dominick Dunne.
It begins with a house and ends in ashes . . .
Diana Cooke was "born with the century" and came of age just after World
War I. The daughter of Virginia gentry, she knew early that her parents
had only one asset, besides her famous beauty: their stately house,
Saratoga, the largest in the commonwealth, which has hosted the crème of
society and Hollywood royalty. Though they are land-rich, the Cookes do
not have the means to sustain the estate. Without a wealthy husband,
Diana will lose the mansion that has been the heart and soul of her
family for five generations.
The mysterious Captain Copperton is an outsider with no bloodline but
plenty of cash. Seeing the ravishing nineteen-year-old Diana for the
first time, he's determined to have her. Diana knows that marrying him
would make the Cookes solvent and ensure that Saratoga will always be
theirs. Yet Copperton is cruel as well as vulgar; while she admires his
money, she cannot abide him. Carrying the weight of Saratoga and
generations of Cookes on her shoulders, she ultimately succumbs to duty,
sacrificing everything, including love.
Luckily for Diana, fate intervenes. Her union with Copperton is brief
and gives her a son she adores. But when her handsome, charming Ashton,
now grown, returns to Saratoga with his college roommate, the real
scandal and tragedy begins.
Reveling in the secrets, mores, and society of twentieth-century genteel
Southern life, The Dying of the Light is a romance, a melodrama, and a
cautionary tale told with the grandeur and sweep of an epic Hollywood
classic.
