In the end I liked this book, but I found it pretty slow going. It suffers from having a beginning that stretches out for about 80% of the book. Two lots of brother and sister characters are introduced - the English siblings are a garden designer living in France and her London antique dealer brother, and the French siblings are having a family feud over the land left by their parents. The stories touch obliquely but it took a dreadfully long time for me to be bothered about any of them. The author tries to speed up the story by beginning with a flash forward to “something terrible has been discovered” but this just makes the book seem slower as it takes so long to get back to that point; I would have enjoyed the story more without it.

A good book with a few pacing flaws as far as I was concerned.