Tom came running up, pulling at his socks, so that there seemed something hiccuping, drunken, in his progress.

“We have been cleaning up,” he said cheerfully.

Mrs. Oxford winced. These poor children in their menial roles—And here came Sarah, with a smut on her cheek.

Left in genteel poverty by the death of their father, the Fontayne siblings—Sarah, Philly, Christopher, and Tom—are shaken when their mother, loving but dizzy, takes a liking to Julian, a widowed neighbour with two children of his own. Sarah becomes infatuated with a thirty-something diplomat. Philly endures being painted by a dull local artist. Julian’s daughter Bronwen, a child prodigy who has already published a book, deals with the pressures of a literary life. And, in the end, a valiant attempt is made to revive the decaying, long-neglected ballroom of the family home for Sarah’s 18th birthday party. All against a backdrop of the ominous approach of World War II.

Evoking Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Beneath the Visiting Moon is both a glittering, funny tale of romance and family life and a brilliant, haunting story of youthful hopes and heartbreaks in a world on the brink of devastating change.

‘First-rate comedy. What a delightful little world it is that Miss Cavan has created and how truly representative of the time’ New York Times

Romilly Cavan