Van Zale Books in Order

Under the heading Van Zale you will find Susan Howatch's two linked Wall Street sagas, The Rich Are Different and Sins of the Fathers. Together they trace the rise and fallout of an American banking dynasty and the outsiders who become entangled with it.

The story begins in the 1920s, when Dinah Slade, a young Englishwoman trying to save her crumbling family home and launch a cosmetics business, meets New York investment banker Paul van Zale. In The Rich Are Different she is drawn into his marriage, his firm and his complicated household. The novel takes the reader from the champagne years of the Roaring Twenties through the crash, the Depression and the approach of war, as fortunes are made and lost and loyalties are tested.

Sins of the Fathers moves on to the next generation. Vicky van Zale, Paul's granddaughter, grows up in a world of privilege where wealth is taken for granted and people are often treated as pieces on a board. Forced into a strategic marriage and pulled between her domineering father, her ambitious husband and a dangerous lover, she has to work out what kind of life she wants before their schemes destroy her.

Like Howatch's British family sagas, the Van Zale novels use multiple first person voices to tell the story from sharply different perspectives. Boardrooms, Long Island estates and the Norfolk Broads all appear as backdrops to deals, betrayals and uneasy love affairs. The books also echo the rise and fall of figures from Roman history, a pattern that gives an extra bite to the clashes over succession and power.

Read as a pair, these novels show how the decisions of one generation echo through the next, turning private compromises into public crises. On this page the Van Zale books are presented in order, with summaries and series notes, so you can follow the dynasty straight through from Dinah and Paul to Vicky's fight to break free.