House of Gold

September 3, 2018
Set on the eve of WWI, this engrossing family epic by Solomons (The House at Tyneford) draws back the curtains on the opulent life of a European banking dynasty just as its world begins to shatter. The scions of the House of Goldbaum know their duties: marry other Goldbaums and serve the family. Even rebellious Greta Goldbaum will not risk her place in the family, and she obediently leaves her beloved Vienna to become the perfect English wife for her cousin, Albert. She had hoped he harbored a wild streak like their French cousin Henri or shared her brother Otto’s sweetness, but she finds his passion for beetles and butterflies as horrifying as he finds her penchant for not wearing shoes. Their opposites-attract romance is palpable from their first encounter, and the turmoil roiling around them is just as captivating. Across Europe, the Goldbaums navigate what the reader knows to be inevitable: Russian pogroms, socialist reform, and the Great War itself. Though the family itself is close-knit, isolation permeates their lives—as Jewish people in an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe, as oligarchs in a democratizing world, as individuals drowning beneath expectation. In Solomons’s skillful hands, the plot winds around Europe and blossoms into a poignant portrait of characters stuck in an unavoidable paroxysm of global change.