An epic performance that brings a lost novelist back to life

Hugh Walpole, now almost forgotten, was a literary giant. Descended from the younger brother of the 18th-century prime minister Robert Walpole, he was a prodigiously fast writer who seldom revised his work, producing at least a book a year between 1909 and his death in 1941. But who reads him these days? His books sold in vast numbers, including in America, where on his lecture tours in the 1920s he was more lionised than Dickens had been 80 years earlier. With his accumulated wealth he became a discerning art collector and left a fabulous legacy of paintings to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam.

In 1924 he made a home in his beloved Keswick, where between 1927 and 1932 he wrote the only one of his works which remains in print: this brilliant chronicle of the Herries family — the name Herries taken from Redgauntlet, the historical novel of Walpole’s literary god, Sir Walter Scott.