Eighty-year-old Joan McAllister faces the difficulty of moving to a London retirement home run by an officious and insensitive nurse manager. To make that dire prospect sweeter, her daughter, Eloise, takes Joan on a trip to South Africa, where Joan's Dutch family lived through the Boer War. Joan makes delightful ancestral discoveries in the town's archives, but Eloise's discovery-that the metal in which she invested millions of her hedge-fund company's money is not performing well-sends her flying back home early to face her furious, pen-eating boss. She reconnects with her French ex-lover, whose promising research into the metal osmium generated Eloise's financial risk in the first place. Meanwhile, Joan struggles through her days at the retirement home, taking comfort in the hallucinated brass piano pedals she sees everywhere and relishing her new friend, Paul, a shy, pimply 15-year-old whom she meets in the basement archives of the local library. Mason (The Drowning People) has written a suspenseful tale that is unusual in its dealing expertly with myriad subjects: old age, the Anglo-Boer War, high finance, metallurgy, and classical music. This extremely absorbing novel is highly recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/08.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Rich in historical background and indelible characters, Mason's third novel explores the issue of the responsibility of one generation of a family to another, whether motivated by duty or by love. Risk-taking London hedge-fund-manager Eloise McAllister puts her reputation and her fund's future on the line with a buy based on a remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist, at the same time that she is working to relocate her 80-year-old mother, Joan, to a retirement home. Before Joan moves to the Albany, she travels with Eloise to her childhood home in South Africa. Here, in a museum's archives, Joan finds her grandmother's journal of the Anglo-Boer War about her year in a concentration camp where four of her children died. As Eloise seeks desperately to reverse the effect of a drop in her fund, Joan increasingly slides into dementia-induced hallucinations of her past and of the lives of nineteenth-century residents of the Albany. Published in England in 2008 as Lighted Rooms, this is an ambitious and brutally honest view of love, family, and aging.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2009 Booklist