"Rich in historical background and indelible characters, Mason’s third novel explores the issue of the responsibility of one generation of a family to another, whether motivated by duty or by love. Risk-taking London hedge-fund-manager Eloise McAllister puts her reputation and her fund’s future on the line with a buy based on a remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist, at the same time that she is working to relocate her 80-year-old mother, Joan, to a retirement home.
"Before Joan moves to the Albany, she travels with Eloise to her childhood home in South Africa. Here, in a museum’s archives, Joan finds her grandmother’s journal of the Anglo-Boer War about her year in a concentration camp where four of her children died. As Eloise seeks desperately to reverse the effect of a drop in her fund, Joan increasingly slides into dementia-induced hallucinations of her past and of the lives of nineteenth-century residents of the Albany. Published in England in 2008 as Lighted Rooms, this is an ambitious and brutally honest view of love, family, and aging."—Michele Leber, Booklist
