Keep an eye on Kate

I just finished The House at Riverton by Kate Morton. It is the young Australian's first book and it's excellent. The main character (Grace) is a 99-year-old woman. She is insightful and sympathetic but never melodramatic. Most of the novel is a flashback of her time as a servant in a great estate outside of London. She works for a family with two sisters who become involved with a poet who takes his own life. Or that is how the story goes ...
Not only is this book an amazing work of historical fiction - set in the 19-teens through 1920s when the Victorian traditions began to give way to flappers and jazz - as well as a satisfying, suspenseful mystery; but most importantly a beautifully written book. Here is a passage when 99-year-old Grace sees a collection of old photos at a fair.

"It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed throught the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings."

Haunting.