I Capture the Castle (Vintage Classics) Book

This wonderful novel tells the story of seventeen year old Cassandra and her extraordinary family who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Cassandra's eccentric father is a writer whose first book took the literary world by storm but he has since failed to write a single word and now spends most of his time reading detective novels from the village library. Cassandra's elder sister Rose - exquisitely beautiful vain and bored - despairs of her family's circumstances and determines to marry their affluent American landlord Simon regardless of the fact she does not love him. She is in turns helped and hindered in this by their bohemian stepmother Topaz an artist's model and nudist who likes to commune with nature. Finally there is Stephen dazzlingly handsome and hopelessly in love with Cassandra. In this maelstrom Cassandra strives to hone her writing skill. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries which candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls and her own first descent into love.By the time she pens her final entry she has captured the heart of the reader in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments.

Dodie Smith's 1940s novel, I Capture the Castle, has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met, according to J.K. Rowling. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink is the first line of the novel, as Cassandra Mortmain's journal chronicles her life with her impoverished family in a crumbling castle, and describes how their lives are turned upside down when American heirs to the castle arrive.