A House Full of Daughters

In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from

Shocking and brave... Nicolson's anger, tenderness and insight have resulted in an exceptionally moving book

I couldn't put it down... Enthralling, touching and beautifully written

Original and illuminating… A House Full of Daughters gallops through seven generations with confidence and ease: it is funny in parts, painful in others but always honest.

Tense, highly personal and beautifully written... A powerful and moving family portrait

Candid, poignant, well-written and wonderfully life-affirming

The most enjoyable book to take on holiday would undoubtedly be Juliet Nicolson’s A House Full of Daughters . It combines history with memoir in a way that both historians and memoirists should envy

In prose that is lyrical and sometimes self-lacerating, she anatomises the failures of love and attention, none the less destructive for being inadvertent, from which these husbands, wives, parents and children, suffered so acutely … Lent grace by Nicolson’s lustrous prose, and by the redemptive hope that love and forgiveness will free the latest generations from the baleful patterns of the past.

A marvelous writer, with a wonderful eye for detail

Wonderful

Nicolson’s aim in her meditative contribution to Nicolson studies is not so much to chronicle…as to search for patterns in the intergenerational weave… A fascinating social document.

Juliet Nicolson is the bestselling author of three works of social history, The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911; The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War ; and Frostquake: The frozen winter of 1962 and how Britain emerged a different country ; as well as a family memoir, A House Full of Daughters . She is a mother and a grandmother and lives with her husband in East Sussex.