“The Duke’s Children” is a novel about sorrow and loss, and about a parent’s pained discovery that our children inevitably grow to love us less than we love them.

It offers us a tale of age and maturity: Palliser is retired now, his parliamentary career behind him, and his tenure as prime minister viewed with a haunting sense of failure.

Most shockingly of all, his beloved wife Lady Glencora is dead.

Struggling to adapt to life without Glencora, he works hard to guide and support his three adult children. Palliser soon discovers, however, that his own plans for them are quite different from their own desires.

Despite everything he does and everything he tells them, his children are about to disobey him in the most cutting ways possible by marrying the wrong people and making the wrong life choices.

This is the final novel in Trollope’s Palliser series, and readers of the previous five will enjoy glimpses of their important characters, such as Phineas Finn (of Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux).

With its wit, charm, and trenchant criticism of upper-class hypocrisies, The Duke’s Children is a beautifully written, nineteenth century tale of unconditional parental love.

Trollope was a novelist concerned with our humanity, our fitful pleasures and lingering anxieties; but he has never spoken to our contemporary world more clearly than he does in this book, as he surveys the nature of conservatism and liberalism in all their facets, and the "woman question".

He was sadly aware that the position afforded women in Victorian Britain was in the long run unendurable, and being as committed a Liberal as his creation, he wished to see society mend its ways.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882) was a British novelist and journalist, one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. He wrote insightful novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters. Among his masterworks are the Palliser novels, The Warden, Barchester Towers, and The Way We Live Now.