Restoration Heart: A Memoir

Review A funny and unexpectedly touching bookCountry LifeA touching, entertaining memoir which traces the twin track restoration of a broken heart and dilapidated Shropshire ManorThe TabletA very amusing and candid memoirJeremy Musson, architectural historian and broadcasterAn endearing story of rebuilding and restoringYou magazineAn excellent memoirNicholas ColeridgeBreathtaking untold story . . . riotously colourfulMail on SundayCash emerges as a flamboyant character . . . a classically English romantic . . . Cash's transition is genuinely endearingThe Art NewspaperCash, who has often written of society and scandal, is adept at setting dramatic scenes throughout his memoir. Yet there's another layer to Restoration Heartan acute literary sense . . . Restoration Heart is buoyed by Cash's selfeffacing humor. He's a romantic when it comes to love, and also writingThe MillionsHilarious . . . Restoration Heart conveys the transformative power of good architecture . . . this book is one to be treasuredThe New CriterionI read most of it in one exciting sitting. It's brilliant, gripping and sad. The personal romantic memoir is terrificI'm very much enjoying Restoration HeartJohn Challis, aka Boyce in Only Fools and Horses and restoreawreck authorImmensely readable . . . Laughoutloud funny, Restoration Heart is a delightful true story of love, hope and redemption by one of the foremost society writers of our dayTatlerIntriguing . . . wittily recounted and moving . . . This book will surely give heart to anyone embarking on a seemingly Sisyphean restoration job, be it of the house or of the soulThe LadyRecommendedHistoric HouseRecommended . . . unexpected poignancyNew StatesmanThis entertaining, often poignant, book is straight out of Waugh or WodehouseCatholic Herald Product Description 'Breathtaking untold story . . . riotously colourful' Mail on Sunday'I read most of it in one exciting sitting. It is brilliant, gripping and sad' Harry MountRestoration Heart is a story of love, double divorce and redemption. It is a biography of the heart, and of a house. When William Cash suffers a postdivorce, midlife breakdown, aged 43, life seemed bleak but things were about to change. Like William himself, his old Shropshire family house Upton Cressett was in as much in need of being rescued and 'fixed up' as its owner. As William embarks on rebuilding his life and ruin of a country house, he starts looking again for love. But money, patience and the likelihood of ever finding family happiness soon start to run out.Drawing on his haul of letters written to various wives, fianc?es and girlfriends all potential third wives the book follows Cash's search for a chatelaine for Upton Cressett. Restoration Heart is a tempestuous, Gulliverlike voyage of the heart with a colourful cast of figures including Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Hurley, David Hockney, Piers Morgan, an American singer legend cousin and, most dramatically, future prime minister Boris Johnson. Hilarious and poignant, this 'restoreawreck' memoir is an account of how an Englishman is rescued by love, architecture and beauty. The memoir also holds up a dark lens to the Bonfire of the Vanities generation that Cash was a member of at Cambridge.The story reveals how a broken man can become completely transformed both emotionally and imaginatively by a building and its surrounding landscape. During the four year refurbishment, the house's reclamation becomes inexorably linked with his own rebirth and salvation before he finally marries for the third time and gets to live in his family house. This is not a miserymemoir; it is an uplifting albeit tempestuous Gulliverlike biography of the heart with an ancient Elizabethan house as the writer's Arcadian safe house and source of salvation. About the Author William Cash is the author of a Hollywood memoir and a biography of Graham Greene, The Third Wom