Edenhope

Francis John Simcock’s fourth novel, is the story of tragedy-scarred families who, at various stages of their lives, live in a former farmhouse mansion in the Shropshire hills. They originate from Cheshire, as tenant farmers who fall on bad times; Yorkshire as wealthy mill owners; and the Edenhope family itself, owners of the small estate of which the house and its home farm is the centre. Timewise the story ranges through most of the twentieth century and beyond, and geographically from London to Manchester and Herefordshire, Leicestershire to Snowdonia. Always the house, Edenhope, looms in the background, seeming, as Stephen, one of the story’s central figures says on the book’s first page, to exercise a power of its own, over the minds and actions of the people fated to inhabit it. But beyond the ghastly event that means none of them again bide within its walls there develop friendships and loving relationships that put its evils into their proper place.