Over the Mountains

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Synopsis
"The shot went on and on. It was chasing me through the darkness, a swift, pursuing pain. After I had outrun it, I slept sound." So Lieutenant Thomas Weston records the moment of his supposed death in war. The time is May, 1940, and the British armies are retreating toward Dunkirk. Thomas is reported as missing, and later a fellow prisoner confirms that he was killed while trying to escape. In London, his grandmother and his old nurse, Brigstock, refuse to give up hope. Living placidly under the same perilous roof, with the German bombers overhead, each believes Thomas to be alive--and each keeps her hope a secret from the other. The rest of Thomas's family accept his death as fact. Six thousand miles away, in Hollywood, his father, the aging movie star, mourns him sadly and ostentatiously. At work in New York, at play in Bermuda, Thomas's brother Gerald finds the taste of a brilliant Broadway success and much-publicized marriage turning sour. Haunted by guilt, he fights a private war with his own weakness. For Thomas's sister Sarah there is also a war to be fought. Heartbroken, rebellious, caught in America and longing for England, she escapes at last, only to find herself in Lisbon, "the crossroads of the world." In this bizarre milieu, she is joined by the girl Thomas was to marry: Rab, through with war and on her reluctant way back to America. But Rab has changed; a different love has turned her into a person lonelier and more adult than before. The backbone of this poignant novel, however, is the "unwritten notebook" in which Thomas tells his own truth. Lost to the world, a prisoner on the run, he hunts his way through his beloved France to the Riviera coast. He is taken prisoner again: first by a vivid eccentric who finds him at her villa gates; next by the guards who pick him up at the Spanish frontier. All his adventures, though capable of rational explanation, have an element of magic to them--even his final, unexpected rescue. Over the Mountains, which ends the trilogy Clothes of a King's Son, brings the main characters to a peak moment in their lives. Thomas, the "king's son" of the title, is an unforgettable person of unusual stature, and readers of Sing for Your Supper and Slaves of the Lamp will rejoice to meet him and the other Westons again. Those who have not yet discovered the previous novels about this stimulating, exasperating and decidedly odd family are in for a happy surprise; the Westons' old friends will find Miss Frankau's continuation of their adventures funny, sad and exhilarating.
Copyright:
1967

Book Details

Book Quality:
Excellent
Book Size:
342 Pages
Publisher:
Random House Inc.
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Pamela Frankau
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Literature and Fiction
Submitted By:
BookLady
Proofread By:
Sharon Monthei
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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