Description

‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure’ – Jilly Cooper, author of The Thursday Murder Club

‘Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.’

The lives of Humphrey and James Boyce, a seasoned antique dealer and his good-looking nephew, are changed for ever when the elegant Leonora Eyre glides into their bustling Bond Street salesroom, delicate as porcelain, cool as ice. An impassioned bid lands her a coveted book and two equally enthralled companions.

As the enigmatic Leonora navigates these relationships, others are drawn into her mysterious and intoxicating web, and a world of human complexities and simmering desires is exposed.

Pym brings her unique voice to this darkly comic exploration of love, loneliness and jealousy.

‘I’m a huge fan of Barbara Pym’ – Richard Osman, author of The Thursday Murder Club

‘Faultless’ -The Guardian

‘Her characters are all meticulously impaled on the delicate pins of a wit that is as scrupulous as it is deadly’ – The Observer

‘A coldly funny book’ -The Sunday Telegraph

‘Highly distinctive . . . The critics who have recently insisted on Miss Pym’s too long neglected gifts have not been wrong’ – Financial Times

Publisher Review

The most underrated novelist of the century . . . The subtlest of her books - the sparkle on first acquaintance has been succeeded by the deeper brilliance of established art -- Philip Larkin [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 A splendid, humorous writer -- John Betjeman Barbara Pym has a sharp eye for the exact nuances of social behaviour * The Times * The wit and style of a twentieth-century Jane Austen * Harpers & Queen * Barbara Pym's unpretentious, subtle, accomplished novels are for me the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years . . . Spectacular * The Sunday Times * Very funny and keenly observant of the ridiculous as well as the pathetic in humanity * Financial Times * Beneath the gentle surfaces of [Pym's] novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip . . . Her work offers the reassurance that we are all as bad and as good, as prickly and as resilient, as any Evensong attendee. It is a useful gratification in grating times * The New York Times *