The Rich Are Different by Susan Howatch (1977)

The Rich Are Different
by Susan Howatch
Publisher:  Simon and Schuster
Copyright:  1977
Book Club Edition

"I was in London when I first heard of Dinah Slade.  She was broke and looking for a millionaire, while I was rich and looking for a mistress.  From the start we were deeply compatible."

With these words, Susan Howatch, one of the authentic storytellers of our time, begins her sweeping and astonishing novel, a book that for sheer power, drama and narrative urgency transcends even Penmarric and Cashelmara, both worldwide successes.

The Rich Are Different is the story of Dinah Slade, a young Englishwoman of immense vitality and great sensual power, whose life, loves and fierce ambition become entwined with the fate of a great American banking family.  The ingredients of The Rich Are Different are guaranteed to excite and satisfy the interest of every reader:  a great fortune, an ambitious and beautiful woman, the struggle for control of a worldwide business institution that is an empire in its own right . . .

When Paul Van Zale, a handsome, patrician and powerful American banker, meets Dinah Slade in London, he commits the imprudence of falling in love with her.  Away from home, living in Mallingham, Dinah's beautiful country house, Paul is escaping from the cares of his empire and his personal life, freed from his preoccupation with the illness that torments him, from the wife who waits for him, from the enemies and rivals he has made on his daring and brutal rise to wealth and power.  But the past is too strong for him to escape, and the demands of his empire must be met.  Leaving Mallingham, Dinah and the son he has fathered behind him, Paul returns to New York to face the crises in his business and his marriage.

When Dinah follows him to his world, she is caught up in the complex currents of Paul's life, exposed to a group of people whose very existence she had scarcely imagined, and whose own futures are now bound up with hers:  there is Sylvia, Paul's wife, with whom he still manages to maintain an almost perfect marriage, to Dinah's shock; there is Elizabeth, his former mistress; there is Steve, Paul's ambitious and energetic protege, whose brute strength and masculinity both attract and repel Dinah; and above all, there is Cornelius, Paul's nephew and chosen heir, a handsome, secretive, diffident young man whose capacity for ruthless action and whose towering ambitions are only barely hidden, and who looks on Paul's foreign adventure, and particularly on Dinah and her son, as threats to his own future bid for power . . .

Paul's sudden death, the results of complex conspiracy among his rivals, enemies and subordinates, Steve's swift and disastrous grasp of Paul's inheritance, including Dinah herself, the patient, cunning and merciless progress of Cornelius toward his goal -- and his ultimate confrontation with Dinah -- are intertwined with such mystery that few readers will be able to put The Rich Are Different down until they have reached its astonishing climax.

With the same skill that enabled her to bring the nineteenth century so vividly to life in Penmarric and Cashelmara, Susan Howatch has re-reated the period from 1922 to 1940 in The Rich Are Different.  The luxury of the twenties, the agony of the crash, the gathering storm of war, all form the background against which the characters of her novel play out their lives, from generation to generation, in a book that will not only confirm but enhance Ms. Howatch's unique reputation and astonishing record of success.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover is discolored from age and shows shelf wear.  Pages are tanning from age.  Previous owner's "Library Of" stamp is on the front endpaper.

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