Favourite of the Gods

One of Britains most stylish and accomplished writers. Telegraph Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the Mediterranean, about the pleasure of food and wine. Victoria Glendinning A writer of consummate artistry. Auberon Waugh An excellent stylist and a splendid narrator . . . and this is a very clever work. The New Yorker A study of the rich . . . an examination of love . . . and a statement of what Henry James either did not or would not know about the darker side of the portrait of the lady. Bedfords mind is radiant. Her alarming economy of style burns. V. S. Pritchett Constanza and her young daughter step off a train in the French Riviera in the late 1920s without the slightest notion of where they are. But their story begins with Constanzas parents: a beautiful New England heiress, a Roman prince and the confused catastrophe of their marriage. An idyllic childhood spent in crumbling Roman palaces, sun-baked olive groves, at sumptuous parties and being taught by the most interesting men in Rome, is changed forever by a fatal clash of culture and an impulsive decision. In this elegant novel, Sybille Bedford tells the story of three generations of women, of Europe and America, and the turbulence of the early twentieth century.