Historical Novel

The descendants of Matthew Flood, heirs to a lusty tradition of hot-blooded adventure and passionate appetites, now fulfill their great destiny. Ranging from Europe to the depths of Africa, this great dynasty proves equal to its founder in ambition and ruthlessness, until the stormy John Flood remakes the family heritage into a legacy of honor.

Sometimes we must pay for the sins of our fathers… In the years between the two Great Wars, Aldebaran Flood has risen to prominence with the publication of her book, Bells on her Fingers, and its subsequent adaptation to film. Preparing to leave England for a four-month speaking tour of the United States, she begins to wonder who she will be when she returns. For several years she has loved, and has been loved by, the handsome Orlando Sax, whose family has, for generations, been the bitter enemy of her own, but despite his repeated proposals, she finds herself unable to commit to marrying him until she has come to terms, not only with her own past, but with that of her family. Her journey takes her from London to New York, Detroit to the Deep South, before she finally discovers in Paris the answers she has been looking for. What she faces during her travels will affect her to the core—and when she comes home again it is with the determination that Orlando cannot want a woman with a chequered past such as hers. If Orlando is to win Aldebaran as his bride, he must step into that past and learn to accept it as part of the woman that he loves. Phoenix Rising is a thrilling literary tale and the third in Marguerite Steen’s Flood Trilogy . Praise for Marguerite Steen “PHOENIX RISING completes the chronicle of the Bristol family of Flood—a story which has been one of the most lively and satisfying published in the last two decades. It has a passionate Sincerity And A Sense Of Reality, Heightened By Its Fidelity To Period. No Reader Of The Sun Is My Undoing Or Twilight On The Floods Need Fear To Be Disappointed.” — Sketch “The Same Lively Writing, Vivid Characterisation And All Too Human Understanding Of People That Graced The Sun Is My Undoing.” — Liverpool Post “Dramatic and exciting…has a lively quicksilver quality that lights each chapter.” — Scotsman “Very rich and enjoyable.” — Observer Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 – 4 August 1975) was a British writer. Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. Her first major success was Matador (1934), for which she drew on her love of Spain, and of bullfighting. Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing (1941). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1951.