When change moves her family, she knows how to accept what she, by her training and personal standards, cannot possibly condone. Yet rooted as she is among the stern hills, stone villages and old, beloved ways, Violet keeps a sharp eye on what is happening in the outside world. But again, at seventy-seven, what did a few wrinkles matter? A small price to pay for an energetic and active old age.'' Which was proved by her complexion, weather-beaten and lined as an old farm worker's.
As for the weather, she disregarded it, caring not if it froze or snowed or blew or rained or scorched, provided she could be out of doors and part of it all. where her roots were deep, surrounded by a countryside that she had known since she was a child. And behind them all stands Edmund's mother, Violet, living her staunch, independent life: Back in Scotland, Alexa's stepmother, Virginia Aird, is caught in conflict with her husband, Edmund, about the schooling of their adored little boy, while Edmund himself tries to cope with troubling memories. Another young woman, Alexa Aird, has put down roots in London and built up a career as a fancy caterer. Her niece, Lucilla, trekking through Europe with backpack and Australian lover, is equally free, but sees more clearly into her future.
Skillfully, through flashes back and forth, the characters are led toward the great event.Īmong the cast is Pandora Blair, a charming, uninhibited, ''free'' woman who has lived all over the world, and who is headed for disaster. As the book opens, plans are being made for a 21st-birthday celebration, a formal, traditional ball, complete with kilts and Highland reels, to be given at a grand house, centuries old. The immediate time span of the novel covers the months from May to September. In ''September,'' a few of them are coaxed back to the Highlands, back from the sunshine in flowery Majorca and from the sparkle of sophisticated, upward-striving London. In their varied ways, even those sons and daughters who have long since left Scotland are nevertheless bound to it, for it is in their bones. An alluring sense of this place is at the very core of the book. ''September'' is a story of kith and kin set in the Scottish Highlands. If in her best-selling novel ''The Shell Seekers'' Rosamunde Pilcher revealed much of herself through the person of Penelope Keeling, then certainly she has done so again, with a different heroine, in ''September.'' This time it is Violet Aird, a woman who, though old in years, is most vividly and warmly young in spirit.
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