Stella Gibbons : Starlight

Stella Gibbons will always be best known for her first book, Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932, winner of the Femina Vie Heureuse prize and described by the Sunday Times as ‘very probably the funniest book ever written’. I read it as a teenager and periodically reread it, but for a long time I had no idea that Stella Gibbons had written at least twenty-nine other novels. Thanks are due to the Dean Street press who have a project of republishing novels by writers like Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons who were very aware of the class system of their time and not afraid to have characters who are old, irascible or working class (often all three).

Heather Rose : nothing bad ever happens here

Believing and belonging occupy a great deal of human life. What to believe? How to belong? All of it is a mystery that we fill with stories.

Heather Rose’s memoir nothing bad ever happens here is her attempt to tease out the stories that make sense of her life. A Tasmanian, and author of seven books, but best known for her prize-winning novel about  Marina Abramovic, The Museum of Modern Love, she has also run a successful advertising agency and raised three children while writing her books. Hers is a life of hard work and a relentless search for meaning and spirit.

Fay Weldon: Affliction and Worst Fears