Amberwell

Amberwell is a 1955 novel by D. E. Stevenson, published by Collins as a 320-page book and recorded as the first of the Ayrton Family sequence.

The novel is built around a place. Five children grow up at Amberwell, and the book gives each of them a different relationship to the house while making the shared attachment explicit, so that the property is a character with claims on the people rather than a setting.

D. E. Stevenson wrote a large number of such books, and Amberwell began a series that followed this family across several volumes. The five children are given separate lives as the book goes on, and the house is the thing they keep returning to: one marries badly, one is healed by coming home, and one stays and lets the household take the life she might have had. Stevenson wrote family novels for a general readership rather than category romance, and this one spreads its plot across the children rather than following a single couple. Amberwell, its grounds and the question of who will inherit it are the organising subject.