Set in the railway boom of the 1870s, The Way We Live Now captures the turmoil as the old order is swept aside by the brash new forces of business and finance. It contains all the elements that made Trollope the most popular novelist of his day the trials and tribulations of young love, the enduring values of honourable men but also the raw energy and excitement of the most powerful city the world had ever seen, and the greed and corruption that lay just below its glittering surface. It is packed with incident elopement, scandal, suicide, fortunes made and lost, love lost and won. It is filled with a range of characters that only Trollope could create the towering figure of Augustus Melmotte, the great financier Sir Felix Carbury, a young aristocrat so dissolute he would sell his own mother to pay his gambling debts his cousin Roger, a man of integrity horrified at the way the world he knew is slipping away, in love with Felix's sister Hetta who is herself in love with Roger's young protg, the engineer Paul Montague whose life is complicated by a rash engagement to a glamorous American who, it is rumoured, once shot a man in Oregon and has now followed Paul to England to hold him to his promise...