Diet Dinner IdeasThe Hound has seen the world and knows that what Sansa believes in is a lie, and tries to show her what the real world is like. Suddenly, life as she knows it is gone.Cooking Light Creamy Chicken Wild Rice Soup Dinner Menu. All that changes the day she sees her first ghost. In his youth, Gregor nearly burned off half of Sandor's face because he found Sandor playing with a toy that Gregor had discarded.For the first time, she's not the new girl in school and she can be sure she won't have to move away from her new friends in a few months- after all, her Aunt Lysa has promised her that the family won't move again until she's finished high school. I’ve discovered that there’s a recent biography by Kirsten Ellis called Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope.Sandor is the younger brother of Ser Gregor Clegane, nicknamed "the Mountain", a monstrously huge knight and arguably the most feared man in Westeros. Mary Stewart has attributed a lot of Lady Stanhope’s characteristics and habits to the fictional Lady Harriet, including shaving her head and wearing a turban, and only admitting visitors to her room after dark. Lady Hester Stanhope was a real person and if you don’t know anything about her, I can almost guarantee that after reading this book you’ll be completely intrigued and will want to find out more about her amazing life, as I did. The final aspect of this novel I want to mention is the factual element. The story also has what I’m coming to consider one of Stewart’s trademark dramatic, action-packed endings. Some parts of the book are quite creepy and there are some surprising plot twists too that made me want to immediately turn back and read previous sections again. Then, of course, there’s the sound of Harriet’s saluki hounds howling in the distance as Christy explores the palace.
HOUNDS OF LOVE SUMMARY CRACKED
The descriptions of the palace of Dar Ibrahim – with its labyrinth of dusty tunnels and corridors, wall mosaics, cracked marble floors and quiet courtyards – are wonderfully detailed and vivid, especially the scenes set in the old Seraglio, where Christy is given a room for the night. The novel is very dated, I suppose – it’s hard to imagine young tourists like Christy wandering happily through the streets of Damascus and Beirut on their own today – but remembering that the book was written in the 1960s, they sound like fascinating places to have visited and Mary Stewart’s usual beautiful descriptions abound: the beauty of red anemones, the herds of goats grazing on the riverbanks, the scent of jasmine and roses, the fields of sunflowers grown for their oil. As Christy herself tells us at the beginning of the story, she and Charles both have “the ‘spoiled’ quality that we were so quick to recognise in one another a flippant cleverness that could become waspish an arrogance that did not spring from any pride of achievement but was, I am afraid, the result of having too much too young.” Luckily, though, the fact that I didn’t like the characters very much didn’t stop me enjoying the story and The Gabriel Hounds has joined Nine Coaches Waiting and The Moonspinners as one of my top three Mary Stewart novels so far.Īs well as being an exciting page turner, I also loved the atmosphere and the unusual setting. It quickly becomes obvious that something is not right and when Charles joins her the next day they find that, in typical Mary Stewart fashion, they have stumbled upon a mystery!Īlthough Christy is in many ways very similar to Mary Stewart’s other heroines – beautiful, confident, brave and intelligent – I never managed to warm to her, or to her cousin Charles either. She is not made to feel welcome but after a bizarre conversation with the old woman, she is allowed to spend the night there. The cousins travel to the palace separately and Christy is first to arrive. Now over eighty years old, Harriet lives in seclusion with only her servants and her young English companion, John Lethman.
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‘Lady Harriet’, as she now calls herself, became a local celebrity after moving into an old, decaying palace by the Adonis River, dressing as a male Arab and modelling herself on the legendary Lady Hester Stanhope. After unexpectedly meeting her cousin Charles in a street in Damascus, they decide to visit their eccentric Great-Aunt Harriet who has lived near Beirut for several years.
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The Gabriel Hounds is set in the 1960s and narrated by twenty-two-year-old Christy Mansel who is on a tour of Syria and Lebanon.