This is not a novel so much as a series of interconnected short stories following the history of a family beginning in Henry VIII’s time and ending in China in the 1930s. It was Norah Loft’s first book, written in 1935 and already displaying Lofts’ unique gift for truly timeless historical fiction. Each story is written, not from the perspective of that generation’s protagonist, but from the perspective of a bystander from their time. There is a good deal of the type of casual racism that it’s almost impossible to avoid in books written in the 1930s, some of it startlingly offensive to a modern reader. But Lofts’ portrayal of the women in the stories (all but two of the protagonists are women) is unusually modern. The motif of the central family is that they are “free” or “free-spirited,” but these are no manic pixie dream girls. They are strong, brave women who live their lives on their own terms and, because we view them through the eyes of witnesses from their own times, we are able to recognize exactly how unusual they all are. From the half-Romani (and possibly half-royal) runaway nun, to the Jacobite prostitute stuck on a whaling station thousands of miles from her home, to the physician who agrees to become a concubine to a Chinese bandit in order to save the English missionaries she is traveling with, these women are all intelligent, fascinating and, for lack of a better term, badass. I first read this when I was in my early teens and have reread it many times since. It is one of my all time favorite books.