Trespass

Rose Tremain

The story focuses on two pairs of brothers and sisters. Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned bisexual antique dealer from London, visits his sister Veronica in the Cévennes, intending to follow her example, and settle there. Veronica, a fashionable garden designer, is enjoying a late-in-life love affair with Kitty, a watercolourist from a more humble background. Together they are working on a book entitled Gardening without Rain.

Anthony falls for an isolated house called the Mas Lunel. Its owner, Aramon Lunel, is a hopeless alcoholic,who lets his hunting dogs starve and the land go to ruin. He is watched with hatred by his sister, Audrun, who lives alone in an ugly modern bungalow, built on a pocket of Aramon’s land.