When Dinah Brooke?s second novel, Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as squalid and startling, nastily horrific, and a monstrous parody of upper-middle class English life. It is the story of Giles Trenchard, who grows up isolated in an atmosphere of privilege and hidden violence; who goes to war, and returns; and then, one day - like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim - commits an act that calls his past, his character, his whole world into question.