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Welcome to the company of a condescending, judgmental narrator who loves inflicting lengthy discourses, based on clichéd generalisations, on the reader. This guy has no investment in the plot or in the fate of his fellow characters... he doesn't go anywhere as a character... he's boring and humourless... and he's a vehicle for the author's wooden tell-don't-show.
What's to like? Almost nothing. We get the posh-boy-turned-actor narrator describing how a pretty, but talentless and lazy, middle-class woman (Edith) implements her livelihood strategy: "My tastes need at least £80,000 a year". She does this by getting a boring but rich aristocrat to marry her. Then she gets bored. Then she has an affair. Then she goes back to her husband.
It's a plot that would make sense in pre-electricity times but for some reason it's set in the 1990s. This means that Julian Fellowes has to get desperate in explaining why the hell Edith doesn't just get an education and a job and enjoy life like the rest of us: 2/3 in we get a brief discourse on how difficult it is to attain a pleasant quality of life when you're stupid and lazy. The other characters are just as riveting: the husband is decent but unimaginative, the narrator is waspish and dull, the lover is handsome and vain. The mother-in-law is perhaps a bit interesting, a puppetmistress in perfect command of pre-war etiquette and values. Apparently people like this book because it goes into aristo-porn, letting us drool over the descriptions of fine wines in crystal glasses and uhhh... old furniture. The supposedly brilliantly insightful dissections of aristocratic behaviour didn't convince me: sweeping generalisations about "their class" that sound like they're droned out by one of those insufferable, self-centred bores you sometimes have to chew your arm off to get away from at parties.
Read something good instead. Definitely do not buy this.