Weaving the fortunes of the patriarchal Adam Swann and his family into the pageantry of English history in the years following Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897, this sweeping historical novel takes Swann's four sons and daughter into the perilous reaches of government and commerce and the army. As this younger generation of Swanns strives to wed personal dreams to national values, the rumble of the guns of August 1914 signals the end of the world as they and imperial England have known it.