Stella Gibbons : Enbury Heath

Cold Comfort Farm, the book for which Stella Gibbons is best known, was published in 1932 when she was thirty. It is an extraordinary book for a thirty-year old; sophisticated, witty, a wonderful satire of Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb even D H Lawrence. It has been made into films, plays and audio books, and remains a favourite novel of many readers. Not many readers know that she published about twenty-eight books in her lifetime, as well as poetry and journalism. I am gradually dipping into her books, in no particular order, as they cross my path.

Stella Gibbons : Westwood

Stella Gibbons loved Highgate. She moved there in 1936 and lived there for the next forty-six years. This book is as much about Highgate as it is about Margaret Steggles and her friend Hilda and the Challis family. I envy those who live in England and can visit there; it is a long time since I was there, and this book makes me yearn to go back.

Richard Cobb: A Classical Education

Chetna Maroo: Western Lane

Simply Messing about in Books…summer 2024

We have spent our month by the sea, but indoors a great deal of the time, due to the highly changeable weather. Once I would have read about twenty books, but now we have little people in our family who are much more entertaining. So I will write a few notes on the six books I have read during this time, going from most enjoyable to disappointing.

Suburbia

Alba de Cespedes: Forbidden Notebook

Megan Nolan: Ordinary Human Failings

Joan Aiken : The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

My first acquaintance with this well-loved classic by Joan Aiken came many years ago after a short stint in London where our daughter spent six months in a London school. When she was leaving to return home to Australia her delightful headmistress, Miss Wellborn, gave her The Wolves of Willoughby Chase as a farewell gift. At eight years old our timid child could not face a tale where parents disappear and children are ill-treated by vicious usurpers, to say nothing of the wolves. The book disappeared (hopefully passed on to a more robust friend).

Paul Murray: The Bee Sting

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is his fourth novel, and like An Evening of Long Goodbyes, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. He is an Irish writer, and like many other Irish writers, writes about the family and the state of Ireland, or, as here, lets the despair and break-down of family life, speak for life in Ireland and in the wider world.