Download or read book The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym written by Paula Byrne and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously’ JILLY COOPER Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021

Download or read book Excellent Women written by Barbara Pym and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-12-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other people's lives - such as those of her new neighbor, Rockingham, and the vicar next door. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest.

Download or read book Crampton Hodnet written by Barbara Pym and published by Epicenter Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miss Morrow is content in her position as spinster companion to Miss Doggett, even if her employer and the woman s social circle regard her as a piece of furniture. Stephen Latimer, the new cleric and Miss Doggett s dashing new tenant, upsets the balance for Miss Morrow by proposing the long discounted possibility of marriage.

Download or read book Jane and Prudence written by Barbara Pym and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Excellent Women explores female friendship and the quiet yearnings of British middle-class life—a literary delight for fans of Jane Austen. Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates were close friends at Oxford University, but now live very different lives. Forty-one-year-old Jane lives in the country, is married to a vicar, has a daughter she adores, and lives a very proper life in a very proper English parish. Prudence, a year shy of thirty, lives in London, has an office job, and is self-sufficient and fiercely independent—until Jane decides her friend should be married. Jane has the perfect husband in mind for her former pupil: a widower named Fabian Driver. But there are other women vying for Fabian’s attention. And Pru is nursing her own highly inappropriate desire for her older, married, and seemingly oblivious employer, Dr. Grampian. What follows is a witty, delightful, trenchant story of manners, morals, family, and female bonding that redefines the social novel for a new generation.

Download or read book The Feast written by Margaret Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Kennedy is not only a romantic but an anarchist." —Anita Brookner Summer, 1947. A bizarre catastrophe rocks a seaside village in Cornwall when a cliff tumbles down on the Pendizack Manor Hotel. The hotel is obliterated, and seven guests are killed in the disaster. Everyone else makes a narrow escape. As the survivors tell their stories, the events of the previous week are revealed, and a parade of sins exposed. Gluttony, Lecherousness, Sloth, Pride, Covetousness, Envy and Wrath: all are in residence at Pendizack Manor, and as the day of the disaster creeps closer, it becomes clear that who’s spared and who’s lost might not be as arbitrary as first assumed. A modern upstairs-downstairs comedy with an old-fashioned morality play tucked away inside, The Feast is sly, kaleidoscopic, and utterly ingenious, a novel that only Margaret Kennedy could have written.

Download or read book Quartet in Autumn written by Barbara Pym and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning. In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness. Lovingly and with delightful humour, Barbara Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and – perhaps most keenly felt – their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them. Deliciously, blackly funny and full of obstinate optimism, Quartet in Autumn shows Barbara Pym's sensitive artistry at its most sparkling. Its world is both extraordinary and familiar, revealing the eccentricities of everyday life.

Download or read book The Midnight Hour written by Elly Griffiths and published by Brighton Mysteries. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly minted PI Emma Holmes and her partner Sam Collins are chosen for a high-profile case: retired music-hall star Verity Malone hires them to find out who poisoned her husband, a theater impresario. Verity herself has been accused of the crime. Soon Emma realizes that Verity's life intersects closely with her own. The team of female PIs circle closer to the killer, with the Brighton police hot on their tail. The clues suggest they're looking for a criminal targeting the old music-hall crew. How long will it be before that trail leads straight back to Max? Print run 3,000.

Download or read book Miss Pym Disposes written by Josephine Tey and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-11-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miss Lucy Pym is a high school teacher of French language who wrote a pop psychology book which, to her surprise, turned out best-seller. She is invited by an old friend, a principle of Leys Physical Training College, to be a guest speaker at this women's facility. Miss Pym is warmly accepted and implored to stay at the college until the day of the demonstration. She becomes interested in the lives and personalities of the college students and their teachers. However, under apparently normal relations Miss Pym detects tension, rivalry and jealousy which eventually lead to an accident. But Miss Pym believes there is more to it.

Download or read book Miss Peabody s Inheritance written by Elizabeth Jolley and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Story within a story. Dorothy Peabody is bored with her clerical work, and her role as her mother's carer. She begins to correspond with novelist Diana Hopewell, who sends extracts from her novel in progress. The novel concerns a headmistress travelling around Europe with several companions. As Miss Peabody becomes more involved with the tale, her life becomes inextricably tied with the fictitious events.

Download or read book One of Ours written by Willa Cather and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 1960 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Some Tame Gazelle written by Barbara Pym and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-05-19 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INTRODUCED BY MAVIS CHEEK 'I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym' Richard Osman 'She is the rarest of treasures; she reminds us of the heartbreaking silliness of everyday life' Anne Tyler Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year. Belinda, meanwhile, has harboured sober feelings of devotion towards Archdeacon Hoccleve for thirty years. Then into their quiet, comfortable lives comes a famous librarian, Nathaniel Mold, and a bishop from Africa, Theodore Grote - who each takes to calling on the sisters for rather more unsettling reasons. 'Some Tame Gazelle is my personal favourite for its sparkling high comedy and its treasury of characters . . . [Pym] makes me smile, laugh out loud, consider my own foibles and fantasies, and, above all, suffer real regret when I reach the final page. Of how many authors can you honestly say that?' MAVIS CHEEK

Download or read book An Unsuitable Attachment written by Barbara Pym and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in St Basil's, a North London parish, Barbara Pym's novel is full of high comedy. Her depiction of characters begins with Mark the vicar, and his wife Sophia who is quite obsessed with cats, as is Daisy Pettigrew, the vet's sister.

Download or read book The Flight from the Enchanter written by Iris Murdoch and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A charismatic businessman casts a dark spell over others in this psychologically suspenseful novel by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Black Prince. Mischa Fox’s name is known throughout London, though he himself is rarely seen. Enigmatic and desired, vicious yet sympathetic, he is a model of success, wealth, and charisma. When Fox turns his entrepreneurial gaze on a small feminist magazine known as the Artemis, his intoxicating influence quickly begins to affect the lives of those involved with the paper: the fragile editor, Hunter; generous Rosa, who splits her time and affections between her brother and two other men; innocent Annette, whose journey from school to the real world ends up being more fraught than she could have foreseen; and their circle of friends and acquaintances, all of whom find themselves both drawn to and repulsed by Fox. Told with dark humor, keen wit, and intense insight into the seductive nature of power, The Flight from the Enchanter is an intricate and dazzling work of fiction from the author of The Sea, The Sea and Under the Net, “one of the most significant novelists of her generation” (The Guardian).

Download or read book The Adventures of Maud West Lady Detective written by Susannah Stapleton and published by Picador. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having starting sleuthing on behalf of society's finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And - as Susannah Stapleton reveals - she was a most unreliable witness to her own life. Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime? Interweaving tales from Maud West's own 'casebook' with social history and extensive original research, Stapleton investigates the stories Maud West told about herself in a quest to uncover the truth. With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and Continental blackmailers, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is a portrait of a woman ahead of her time and a deliciously salacious glimpse into the underbelly of 'good society' during the first half of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Farther Afield written by Miss Read and published by HMH. This book was released on 2007-11-07 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A schoolmistress’s summer vacation is ruined—or is it?—in this delightful English village tale. The end of a school year often brings a burst of joy to children’s hearts—and unmitigated rapture to those of their teachers. And so it is for Miss Read, schoolmistress in the charming English village of Fairacre. She happily anticipates long weeks to call her own, free of timetables, bells, children and their parents. But on the very first day of the summer holiday, while retrieving lining paper from her landing cupboard, she falls and breaks her arm. Will she now spend her holiday resigned to the ministrations of the dour Mrs. Pringle? Just when the summer seems to be ruined, Miss Read’s old friend, Amy Garfield, comes to her aid with a diverting suggestion. They can travel to Crete for two weeks, the change of scenery providing a welcome break for them both—and perhaps when Miss Read returns, refreshed, to her beloved village, she’ll be ready to tackle the various quandaries and mishaps that await her . . . “The more turbulent the real world, the more charming we may find the stability of Miss Read’s tiny fictional world.” —Los Angeles Times “Miss Read has three great gifts—an unerring intuition about human frailty, a healthy irony, and, surprisingly, an almost beery sense of humor.” —The New Yorker

Download or read book The Progress of Love written by Alice Munro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-12-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven stunning stories that explore the most intimate and transforming moments of existence, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the foremost practitioners of the short story” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). “Throughout this remarkable collection moments of insight flash from the pages like lightning, not necessarily providing answers—more like showing the way to new questions.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes to the shaken mother the fragility between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his hapless younger brother. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. In these and other stories, Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.

Download or read book At Weddings and Wakes written by Alice McDermott and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three children of an Irish-American family in Long Island are witnesses to the cycles of dissatisfaction, bitterness and recurring affection that make up the lives of their extended family. A tender, sad and funny book from the author of the National Book Award-nominated That Night and Charming Billy