The House at Sunset

by Norah Lofts Book 3 in the The House Trilogy series.

First published 1962

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4.2(813)

The final House novel resumes the story in the eighteenth century and follows the Old Vine into the middle of the twentieth. The building is altered, divided and adapted as Georgian society gives way to Victorian wealth and respectability, then to the shocks of industrial change and modern war. Successive residents arrive with only fragments of the house’s earlier history, while old rooms, objects and stories continue to shape their sense of belonging.
By the time the narrative reaches the world wars and post-war Britain, the survival of the house itself has become uncertain. Lofts makes its changing physical use reflect the decline of older hierarchies and the emergence of new social expectations. The trilogy closes not by restoring a vanished past but by asking what should be preserved when a place has outlived the economic and family structures that created it.