Living with the laird : a love affair with a man and his mansion

A captivating memoir of one woman's relationship with a man and his mansion. 'I knew that when I married the man that I married the mansion,' begins Belinda Rahtbone's captivating memoir of her relationship with a Scottish laird -- and with his 400-acre ancestral home 'The Guynd'.

But there was also much that the urban American did not know when she abandoned her life in New York to become the unlikely chatelaine of this country estate in north-east Scotland after a whirlwind affair with its eccentric owner.

Finding herself in a setting reminiscent of many a classic English novel, Rathbone recounts her story of dealing with a grand but crumbling Georgian mansion still recovering from the effects of two world wars, not to mention a hopelessly overgrown garden, troublesome tenants, and an intractable class system often too dangerous to navigate. With the persistence of the biographer she delves into local history, anecdotes and family papers in her attempt to understand the small Scottish community into which she has been thrown, and with the curiosity of a outsider she imbibes the country wisdom that surrounds her, from the value of dead elm trees and the intricate working of the slow-cooking Aga to how to pluck a pheasant and what to wear to a country ball.

Like a letter home from a strange land, Living With the Laird gives a unique view into the Scottish countryside of today that is both wry and poignant, combining a warm, Bill Bryson-esque view of British society with a fascinating portrait of an historic house and its many colourful inhabitants.

Whether tackling her husband's habit of hoarding bottles of 30-year-old raspberry vinegar and pots of crystallised blackcurrant jam in their icy kitchen, or struggling to revive the fortunes of the rundown Georgian mansion, 'Living With the Laird' tells a larger story: a tale of what happens when two cultures and two worlds -- the old and the new -- collide.