On the day before the examination was due to take place my father drove me to Eton in his swish new Bugatti, which could do a hundred miles an hour, and once we hit the A4 he proved it.

Clifton forges ahead to make a name for himself, while living under the shadow of never having met his father. Once we’d handed in our papers and reverted to our true personas, I went off to tea with my pa, in Windsor. Harry Clifton is wonderful, and is more or less the main character, but they were all fascinating, even Hugo Barrington, who may be one of the most horrible yet believable villains I've ever come across. At least it taught me a simple lesson: if you make a deal with a fool, don’t be surprised when they act foolishly. The epic tale of Harry Clifton’s life begins in 1920, with the words “I was told that my father was killed in the war.Jeffrey Archer hits it out of the park with this epic tale of a young boy trying, with the help of his friends and family, to make his life something no less than extraordinary. Young Harry has a beautiful singing voice and has the intelligence to further his education but without money he needed connections to gets through his schooling and to Oxford. I need an excuse to go into Rome tomorrow,’ he said, ‘because I’m meant to be meeting up with Harry. On ne peut que se précipiter pour lire la suite de ses ouvrages afin de savoir s’il existe une justice immanente.

This is a historical fiction, or maybe even a family drama saga, based in the 1920s to 1940s time frame in England.

I really enjoy family sagas and this was no exception with its well formed characters, a flowing and twisting tale and a little social history to keep the reader entertained. I was good at making up stories, but it wasn’t long before she discovered that was all they were: stories. It was launched by Jeffrey Archer himself in Bangalore, India in March 2011, as the beginning of a global book tour. Jeffrey is published in 114 countries and more than 47 languages, with more than 750,000 5* reviews with international sales passing 275 million copies.

The struggles of his mother to finance Harry’s upbringing (his father is dead) are particularly engrossing, and the intrigue of Harry’s father’s circumstances add an element of suspense to this entertaining novel, which ends with a bombshell of a cliffhanger! The Clifton Chronicles is Jeffrey Archer's most ambitious work in four decades as an international bestselling author. After they had left, Mama went straight to my father’s study and I could hear raised voices, which had recently become more and more common. Whenever my mum found out I’d been playing truant, she couldn’t hide her anger and would stop my halfpenny-a-week pocket money. If it hadn’t been for a personal intervention by the Frob, I might have suffered the same fate at Bristol Grammar.

Harry falls in love with Emma, Giles's sister, and plans to marry her only to find out the secret kept for years and that it could be the only reason to intervene in their innocent and binding love for each other. The plot revolves around the protagonist Harry Clifton, spanning the time between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Second World War. But past encounters with an ex are never far away, and when Harry befriends Giles Barrington, his meddlesome, fraudulent father, Hugo, does his best to deny what happened between Harry’s mother and himself all those years ago. The remaining chapters are told by a third present omnipresent narrator still focused on that character.

Everything would have worked out just fine, if Percy hadn’t told a friend how he’d managed to get into Eton. This book reminded me a little of Downton Abbey and I think readers who enjoyed that series will really enjoy the clifton Chronicles. I listented to it and it made my 3 miles on the treadmill bearable and that is what I want in an audiobook. It just didn't impress me enough, even though I will say that this first book was definitely an entertaining read. It kept retelling the same story but from a different character's perspective, so I had to go back in time to listen to the same story over and over.

Make no mistake, this is not a Pulitzer, but it is good, solid storytelling, with bold characters, a world wide setting, and a story that has enough twists, turns, and sneaky heart-stoppers to definitely merit the label "page turner. Harry promotes his latest book in America while Giles defends his seat in the House of Commons against a shocking opponent, and in 1957 Harry’s son Sebastian wins a scholarship to Cambridge.