Chip Tolson

Birchland Hall Chip Tolson

Birchland Hall is a novel of family drama revolving around a Victorian mansion in the West Yorkshire town of Dewsfield, set in the late 1990s. Cousins Mo and Freddie Holtbury, strangers since an unfriendly childhood, now in their fifties, meet on a bleak October day, the only family at Aunt Ethel's funeral. Neither has married, both are only children. A dilapidated mansion, built by their great-great grandfather, with its contents, is their joint inheritance. Strangers to Yorkshire, they discover the sway their Holtbury forebears held in the once proud manufacturing town. They face an unsought responsibility to bring life back to Birchland Hall. Over months the cousins' lives entangle, searching for family connection.