In a Summer Season
10 best books like In a Summer Season (Elizabeth Taylor): Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, A Month in the Country, The Weather in the Streets, Quartet in Autumn, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child, Cassandra at the Wedding, A Far Cry from Kensington, Devoted Ladies, The Camomile Lawn, Invitation to the Waltz
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
By the Costa Award-winning author of PURE, a stunning historical novel with the grip of a thriller, written in richly evocative, luminous prose.
One rain-swept February night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous...
| Author | J.L. Carr |
| ISBN | 0940322471 |
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside...
| Author | Rosamond Lehmann |
| ISBN | 1844083063 |
Taking up where Invitation to the Waltz left off, The Weather in the Streets shows us Olivia Curtis ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, thinner, sadder, and apprently not much wiser. A chance encounter on a train with a man who enchanted her as a teenager leads to a forbidden love affair and a...
| Author | Barbara Pym |
| ISBN | 0330326481 |
This was recommended to me by various bloggers and certainly lived up to their praise. Originally published in 1977, this was Pym’s seventh novel out of nine; she died in 1980. It’s about four London office workers, all sixty-somethings who are partnerless and don’t have, or at least don’t...
Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child
| Author | Laura Cumming |
| ISBN | 1501198718 |
Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Velazquez Laura Cumming shares the riveting story of her mother’s mysterious kidnapping as a toddler in a small English coastal village—and how that event reverberated through her own family and her art for decades.
In the...
| Author | Dorothy Baker |
| ISBN | 1590171128 |
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra,...
A Far Cry from Kensington
| Author | Muriel Spark |
| ISBN | 0811214575 |
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 of A Far Cry from Kensington, takes us well in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar...
| Author | Molly Keane |
| ISBN | 1844083233 |
Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months and are devoted friends - or are they? Jessica loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness; Jane is rich, silly, and drinks rather too many brandy-and-sodas.
Watching from the sidelines, their friend Sylvester regrets...
| Author | Mary Wesley |
| ISBN | 0099499142 |
Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt's house for their annual ritual of a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with the heady exhilarations...
| Author | Rosamond Lehmann |
| ISBN | 1844083055 |
A diary for her innermost thoughts, a china ornament, a ten-shilling note, and a roll of flame-coloured silk for her first evening dress: these are the gifts Olivia Curtis receives for her seventeenth birthday. She anticipates her first dance, the greatest yet most terrifying event of her restricted...
| Author | R.C. Sherriff |
| ISBN | 1903155487 |
In The Hopkins Manuscript we watch through his eyes as the moon veers off course, draws slowly closer to the earth, and finally crashes into it on May 3rd 1946. Because it falls into the Atlantic much of humanity survives – only to generate new disasters. But this is not science fiction in the mode of H...
| Author | Barbara Pym |
| ISBN | 1559212268 |
If Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates seem an unlikely pair to be walking together at an Oxford reunion, neither of them are aware of it. They couldn't be more different: Jane is a rather incompetent vicar's wife, who always looks as if she is about to feed the chickens, while Prudence, a pristine hothouse...
| Author | Tove Ditlevsen |
| ISBN | 8252700497 |
Tove Ditlevsen was a Danish author publishing books in the mid-20th century. Her poetry, novels and memoirs made her quite famous within her country and she's now accepted as part of the literary canon in Danish primary schools. However, she's little known in the English speaking world because few...
Elizabeth and Her German Garden
| Author | Elizabeth von Arnim |
| ISBN | 0860684237 |
"Elizabeth and Her German Garden," a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, was popular and frequently reprinted during the early years of the 20th century. "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" is a year's diary written by Elizabeth about her experiences learning gardening and interacting with her friends....
