Inherit the Skies

This spirited family saga opens in the present and flashes back to its origins in England in the early 1900s. Gilbert Morse, head of a thriving motor company and master of an imposing estate in the Somerset hills where a batch of willful offspring reside, seizes an opportunity to get a flying machine in the sky. About the same time, his illegitimate daughter, Sarah, finessed out of the affluent household by Gilbert's second wife and sworn enemy of her sexually rapacious half-sister Alicia, is carving out a career as a balloonist. Sarah and Alicia, rivals from their first meeting, remain so as Alicia marries the man Sarah loves, a pilot who will help bring Morse Motor works into the aviation age. The tale chronicles the machinations of various family members, but it is Sarah who endures and triumphs as head of the company. Her nascent feminism and details of the aviation business carry a story that, often intruded on by an omniscient author, dwindles toward the end, when members of the next generation are hurriedly introduced. Tanner wrote The Hills and the Valley. (Nov.)