When the time comes for you to retire, Hugo, if you want a quiet life, don't settle down in the country. Bury yourself in London or any really large city, and you can live like a hermit, but avoid the…
If Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates seem an unlikely pair to be walking together at an Oxford reunion, neither of them are aware of it. They couldn't be more different: Jane is a rather incompetent v…
Young Susan Parsons has just moved, with her unmarried brother Oliver, to a newly-inherited property in the Scottish Highlands. Their neighbours prove a mixed bag, including the towering, kindly Jed A…
Well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good looking and fairly young. Wilmet Forsyth is most, if not all of those things. No matter that Rodney, the handsome army major, working nine thi…
Barbara Buncle is in a bind. Times are harsh, and Barbara's bank account has seen better days. Stumped for ideas, Barbara draws inspiration from fellow residents of her quaint English village, writing…
One of Barbara Pym’s richest and most amusing high comedies, Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of tho…
Barbara Pym is a master at capturing the subtle mayhem that takes place in the apparent quiet of the English countryside. Fifty-something sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a comfortable, settled e…
This is the story of four people in late middle-age - Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia - whose chief point of contact is that they work in the same office and they suffer the same problem - loneliness.…
Monica Dickens's first book, published in 1940, could easily have been called Mariana - an Englishwoman. For that is what it is: the story of a young English girl's growth towards maturity in the 1930…
Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady who cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich. One day, when tidying Lady Dant's wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen …
