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—a southern gothic as written by 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.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Southern Gothic is back…
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2018
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American author Robert Goolrick’s latest novel, “The Dying of the Light”, is set in a huge house, along Virginia’s Rappahannock River. The time is the 1900’s to the 1940’s and the characters and the plot seem as if they’re straight out of a Southern Gothic playbook. Is that bad; doesn’t the reading world need more Southern Gothic novels? Robert Goolrick would obviously say “yes”, and he has written a very good one.
“Saratoga” is one of the biggest family houses in the United States, when the book begins. It’s owners have little coin but much family history and. social prestige. The Cooke family is dying out (along with the money) and everything rests on the one child, Diana Cooke. She’s beyond beautiful, well-bred but still a bit of a rebel, and is ready and willing to sacrifice her future to the highest bidder on the marriage market. That bidder is Copperton, a seemingly immensely wealthy man – self-made – who has no background, no family, no history. That matches well with Diana Cooke and her family history. They marry and he saves Saratoga from ruin.
But the marriage is deeply unhappy. After the birth of their son, Ash, Copperton gives up any pretense of making a marriage with Diana, though both dote on their son. Copperon dies in an accident and leaves all his money to Ash and very little to Diana. The house goes into ruin until Ash, having been asked to leave Yale – “sent down” is the term used (borrowed from the British) and he returns to Virginia with his boarding school and college best friend, Gibby, and it is then that the proverbial fireworks begin. And the book goes completely Southern Gothic.
Robert Goolrick is a very good writer and he milks his material for all it’s worth. He does give nuance to his characters, though, and their fates become important to the reader. “The Dying of the Light” is an enjoyable read and leaves a lingering afterthought about the people and times of those living in Virginia, along the Rappahannock River.
Charlotte’s Web and her opinions on everything!
5.0 out of 5 stars Another fab read.
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2019
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The Dying in the Light by Robert Goodrick is another home run. He writes in such a lyrical style that I was absorbed instantly. I often wonder if the Vanderbilt’s are his inspiration, certainly the Gilded age is. Or maybe I presume to much?
Diana has led an extraordinary life, one I followed from birth until the end. I won’t give to much away, but it is so worth the extra money then the 1.99 daily deals. I feel he does not get the credit he deserves, and hope this book changes that.
I loved it. I absorbed it into my pores. I relished each sentence, for they are long, but he makes them work. Blending words to perfection. I am looking forward to his next work, as I have read them all.
And will continue to do so.
Robert Goolrick Author Of The Dying of the Light pdf Book was born in a small university town in Virginia, a town in which, besides teaching, the chief preoccupations were drinking bourbon and telling complex anecdotes, stories about people who lived down the road, stories about ancestors who had died a hundred years before. For southerners, the past is as real as the present; it is not even past, as Faulkner said.
I went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and then lived in Europe for several years, thinking that I would be an actor or a painter, two things for which I had a passion that outran my talent. I wrote an early novel, and then my parents disinherited me, so I moved to New York, which is where small-town people move to do and say the things they can’t do or say at home, and I ended up working in advertising, a profession that feeds on young people who have an amorphous talent and no particular focus.
Fired in my early fifties, the way people are in advertising, I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I came back around to the pastime that had filled the days and nights of my childhood: telling complex anecdotes about the living and the dead. I think, when we read, we relish and devour remarkable voices, but these are, in the end, stories we remember.
I live in a tiny town in Virginia in a great old farmhouse on a wide and serene river with my dog, whose name is Preacher. Since he has other interests besides listening to my stories, I tell them to you.
You Can get A Copy Of The Dying of the Light pdf Or Paperback By Robert Goolrick from these online store links below.
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