The Children Who Lived in a Barn
10 best books like The Children Who Lived in a Barn (Eleanor Graham): The New House, High Wages, The World That Was Ours, Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary, The Persephone Book of Short Stories, Manja, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, William - An Englishman, Doreen, Greenery Street
| Author | Lettice Cooper |
| ISBN | 1903155371 |
'All that outwardly happens in The New House,' writes Jilly Cooper, 'is over one long day a family moves from a large imposing secluded house with beautiful gardens to a small one overlooking a housing estate. But all the characters and their relationships with each other are so lovingly portrayed that...
| Author | Dorothy Whipple |
| ISBN | 1903155754 |
What a little, shiny Pearl of a BOOK.
"Unfortunately, readability is not a quality that is studied in universities; thus no literary critic has ever defined what makes Dorothy Whipple’s domestic, everyday books so gripping."
Quoted from the website of Persephone books and I couldn't...
| Author | Hilda Bernstein |
| ISBN | 1906462097 |
“It reads like a thriller page after page. . . . The loveliest of Hilda Bernstein’s works about the ugliest of times.”—Albie Sachs, The Independent “Were it not for ordinary heroes like the Bernsteins, South Africa would not be free today.”—Guardian It was 1963 in South Africa during...
| Author | Ruby Ferguson |
| ISBN | 1903155436 |
Sometimes the introduction (or foreword) to a book is a pointless bore, but it can also illuminate a book in a particular way that makes the reading experience more enjoyable. Candia McWilliam provides the foreword to this one and I highly recommend that you read it first, as it does set you up for what...
Most of these stories focus on the small, quiet or unspoken intricacies of human relationships rather than grand dramas. The use of metaphor is delicate and subtle; often the women are strong and capable and the men less so; shallow and selfish motives are exposed.
The dates of these stories range...
| Author | Anna Gmeyner |
| ISBN | 1903155290 |
Written in London by a young Austrian playwright in exile, Manja opens, radically, with five conception scenes one night in 1920. Set in the turbulent Germany of the Weimar Republic, it goes on, equally dramatically, to describe the lives of the children and their families until 1933 when the Nazis...
| Author | Mollie Panter-Downes |
| ISBN | 0953478076 |
For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes' name was associated with "The New Yorker", for which she wrote a regular 'Letter from London', book reviews and over thirty short stories; of the twenty-one in "Good Evening, Mrs Craven", written between 1939 and 1944, only two had ever been reprinted - these very...
| Author | Cicely Hamilton |
| ISBN | 0953478009 |
William was 'written in a rage in 1918; this extraordinary novel... is a passionate assertion of the futility of war' (the Spectator). Its author had been an actress and suffragette; after 1914 she worked at the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont and organised Concerts at the Front. William - an...
| Author | Barbara Noble |
| ISBN | 1903155509 |
Doreen's mother is torn. In World War 2 London, the blitz has begun. Almost all of Doreen's classmates have already been sent to safety in the country, but Mrs. Rawlings doesn't believe in separating children from their parents, even in wartime. But the bombings are growing progressively worse.
"Things...
| Author | Denis Mackail |
| ISBN | 1903155258 |
PG Wodehouse described this novel as 'so good that it makes one feel that it's the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader all about them.'
Greenery Street can be read on two levels - it is a touching description of a young couple's first year together...
| Author | Monica Dickens |
| ISBN | 1903155800 |
The Winds of Heaven is a 1955 novel about 'a widow, rising sixty, with no particular gifts or skills, shunted from one to the other of her more or less unwilling daughters on perpetual uneasy visits, with no prospect of her life getting anything but worse’ (Afterword). One daughter is the socially ambitious...
| Author | Vere Hodgson |
| ISBN | 0953478084 |
Vere Hodgson worked for a Notting Hill Gate charity during the Second World War ; being sparky and unflappable, she was not going to let Hitler make a difference to her life, but the beginning of the Blitz did, which is why she began her published diaries on 25 June 1940: 'Last night at about 1 a.m. we had the...
| Author | Agnes Jekyll |
| ISBN | 1906462038 |
First published in The Times (London) during the 1920s, Kitchen Essays explains the proper way to make Lobster Newburg while offering fascinating insight into the social history of England.Agnes Jekyll felt that cooking should fit the occasion and temperament and states that “a large crayfish...
| Author | Winifred Holtby |
| ISBN | 1903155665 |
Muriel, who believes that ‘men do as they like’ whereas women ‘wait to see what they will do’, lives in a town in Yorkshire waiting – for what? She tries to conform to the values of her snobbish, socially ambitious mother; she tries to be ‘attractive’ to men.
Throughout the description...
| Author | Marghanita Laski |
| ISBN | 1903155762 |
To Bed with Grand Music is about sex in wartime. On the first page (a scene as compelling in its way as the five conception scenes at the beginning of Manja) Deborah and her husband are saying goodbye to each other before he is posted overseas. They swear undying loyalty, well, undying emotional loyalty...
A London Child of the 1870s
| Author | Molly Hughes |
| ISBN | 1903155517 |
The first in a series of three memoirs. Molly Hughes writes of her suburban London Victorian family in the 1870s. In this first book she describes her happy childhood, growing up with her 4 brothers. She describes outings in London and holidays with her mother's family in Cornwall. Hughes notes details...
| Author | Frances Towers |
| ISBN | 1903155347 |
When these captivating and at times bizarre stories were published posthumously in 1949, Angus Wilson wrote: 'It appears no exaggeration to say that Frances Towers's death in 1948 may have robbed us of a figure of more than purely contemporary significance. At first glance one might be disposed to...
| Author | Penelope Mortimer |
| ISBN | 1903155673 |
Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is about the expectations of women, about a house-bound mother reluctantly (desperately) at home all day, in contrast to her daughter who has escaped, to university and then, we can assume, to a job.
In Ruth Whiting’s commuter-belt village ‘the wives conform...
The Fortnight in September
| Author | R.C. Sherriff |
| ISBN | 1903155576 |
The Fortnight in September embodies the kind of mundane normality the men in the dug-out longed for – domestic life at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich, the train journey via Clapham Junction to the south coast, the two weeks living in lodgings and going to the beach every day. The family’s only regret is...
| Author | E.M. Delafield |
| ISBN | 1903155029 |
EM Delafield is best-known as the author of The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930). But her favourite among her books was Consequences (1919), the deeply-felt novel she wrote about the plight of girls given no opportunities apart from marriage.
Alex Clare is awkward and oversensitive and gets...
