Cashelmara.

Cashelmara (1974) is the third of Susan Howatch's celebrated family sagas, following Penmarric (1971) and preceding The Rich Are Different (1977). Howatch (b. 1940), an English-born writer who achieved enormous international success in the 1970s, built these sweeping novels on a distinctive premise: each transposes a famous dynasty from history onto a fictional family in a later age. Cashelmara recasts the lives of the medieval English kings Edward I, Edward II, and Edward III as Edward de Salis and his descendants, a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish landowning family whose seat is the titular house in County Galway. The reign of Edward II, deposed through the machinations of his queen, Isabella, and her lover Roger Mortimer, becomes the saga's tragic centerpiece, played out across six first-person narratives of fidelity, loyalty, passion, ambition, and revenge. A major international bestseller, Cashelmara confirmed Howatch's place among the most successful popular novelists of her day; she would later turn to the acclaimed Starbridge series chronicling the twentieth-century Church of England.