Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error

This book contains not just one, but two stories spanning across two generations of a family, united by a strong matrilineal bond but divided by customs. In A Favourite of the Gods, Anna Howland, matriarch and American heiress born in the 1870s, marries an Italian prince and makes her home in Rome. Her daughter Constanza inherits her mother's beauty and intelligence as well as her father's Catholicism - the last of which she soon rejects. When disaster strikes, Anna and her husband fall back on the standard of behavior and tradition of their disparate cultures while Constanza must plot her own course as she makes for an unconventional life for herself during and after the First World War. Her own daughter Flavia is the heroine of the second book, A Compass Error, which begins where the first novel concludes. Flavia is also brilliant, but far more brash and more faltering than her mother. While studying for her entrance exam to Oxford, she becomes involved with a mysterious woman whose arrival at that moment in Flavia's adolescence will alter both her and her mother's lives forever. Gripping and transcendent, both these tales are stories of families, mystery, hardship, and love.

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