“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endur…
Set on the crazier fringes of 1950s literary London, A Far Cry from Kensington is a delight, hilariously portraying love, fraud, death, evil, and transformation. Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator, t…
When Phyl, a young literature graduate, moves back home with her parents, she soon finds herself frustrated by the narrow horizons of English country life. As for her plans of becoming a writer, those…
Jeannette Haien’s award-winning first novel relates the seemingly simple tale of a parishioner confiding in her priest, but the tangled confession brings secrets to light that provoke a moral quandary…
Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica - the jet-propelled academics are on the move, in the air, in "Small World. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement…
It is the summer of 1851. An English family is making a romantic journey by paddle-steamer on the Rhine, and Charlotte’s imagination is stretched to the limit - one might almost say, to the breaking p…
When the phone rang on a gloomy fall afternoon in 1990, Grégoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that it was the woman who’d left him, without warning, ten years before. And he couldn’t have guessed w…
In Angela Thirkell's first Barsetshire novel, she sets the plot pattern which will be played out in most of her later books. She also introduces us to specific characters as well as 'types' who will a…
