Grandmother Wolf

"In a velvet-lined, treasure-filled room, in a house torn open by shelling that balances precariously on 'the line' dividing East and West Beirut, Madeleine lives out her days like a Lebanese Miss Havisham. Refusing to move out during all but the worst of the fighting, she bickers constantly with her Arab maid, relishes tormenting her middle-aged, unmarried daughter and fussing over her militia-fighting son." "On the other side of the world, Madeleine's grandson Rick finds himself suddenly orphaned, and heir at eighteen to his father's immense fortune: a fortune he tries to reject, along with the responsibilities it demands. When Rick's rebellious behaviour takes a near-fatal turn, his bemused guardians in Seattle decide to force their ward upon his elderly, cantankerous grandmother in the hope that she can instil some of her legendary discipline into him." "And so Madeleine's battered house - a shrine to the cosmopolitan days of Beirut's past - becomes a battleground of its own, in which the conflicts between East and West, youth and old age, idealism and experience are acted out." "But when the whirlwind of civil war finally tears into Madeleine's long-preserved isolation and the violence outside begins to impinge on their own private battle, the two adversaries must form an uneasy truce, and share the only things they have left to give each other: hope and a future."--Book jacket.