'Breathtaking untold story . . . riotously colourful' Mail on Sunday
'I read most of it in one exciting sitting. It is brilliant, gripping and sad' Harry Mount
Restoration Heart is a story of love, double divorce and redemption. It is a biography of the heart, and of a house. When William Cash suffers a post-divorce, mid-life breakdown, aged 43, life seemed bleak - but things were about to change. Like William himself, his old Shropshire family house Upton Cressett was in as much in need of being rescued and 'fixed up' as its owner. As William embarks on re-building his life and ruin of a country house, he starts looking again for love. But money, patience and the likelihood of ever finding family happiness soon start to run out.
The story reveals how a broken man can become completely transformed - both emotionally and imaginatively - by a building and its surrounding landscape. During the four year refurbishment, the house's reclamation becomes inexorably linked with his own re-birth and salvation before he finally marries for the third time and gets to live in his family house. This is not a misery-memoir; it is an uplifting - albeit tempestuous - Gulliver-like biography of the heart with an ancient Elizabethan house as the writer's Arcadian safe house and source of salvation.