South Riding
10 best books like South Riding (Winifred Holtby): Girl, Woman, Other, A Single Thread, The Weather in the Streets, Lolly Willowes, The Heat of the Day, Testament of Friendship, Miss Mole, Summer Will Show, The Priory, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
| Author | Bernardine Evaristo |
| ISBN | 0241364906 |
Joint Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2019
Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories...
1932. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a "surplus woman," one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother....
| 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 | Sylvia Townsend Warner |
| ISBN | 0940322161 |
This is a book about witches. But when I finally put this book down last night, I mostly just thought about my father.
I don’t think it is controversial to say that duty is a bit of an old fashioned word these days. Like honor. It’s one of those words you hear someone say and squirm uncomfortably,...
| Author | Elizabeth Bowen |
| ISBN | 0385721285 |
In The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II.
Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is...
| Author | Vera Brittain |
| ISBN | 0860681505 |
Unfortunately, Winifred Holtby is not well remembered today, even in her home country. The woman who wrote this book, Vera Brittain, has scarcely fared better, despite outliving Holtby by more than thirty years. This is a shame, because they are both worth remembering for numerous reasons. I was deeply...
| Author | E.H. Young |
| ISBN | 0385279752 |
Oddly, the word that springs to mind for this one is "charming." Ok. I really like E.H. Young; this is the fourth book of hers I've not only read but owned. All are set in the early 20th century, so there's always a cultural hump to get over, but this time I find the hump a little...different. The story concentrates...
| Author | Sylvia Townsend Warner |
| ISBN | 0140161767 |
Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory...
| Author | Dorothy Whipple |
| ISBN | 1903155304 |
The setting for this, the third novel by Dorothy Whipple Persephone have published, is Saunby Priory, a large house somewhere in England which has seen better times. We are shown the two Marwood girls, who are nearly grown-up, their father, the widower Major Marwood, and their aunt; then, as soon as...
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
| Author | Julia Strachey |
| ISBN | 1903155274 |
This was absolute rubbish. Wicked too. The story was that although her wedding was but a few hours off, the bride couldn't make up her mind whether she should get married or run off with a previous lover, a dithering sort of person whose job took him on great adventures abroad. He had just turned up again...
Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns
| Author | Kerry Hudson |
| ISBN | 1784742457 |
What does it really mean to be poor in Britain today? A prizewinning novelist revisits her childhood and some of the country's most deprived towns
'When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense...
