The Vet's Daughter

7 best books like The Vet's Daughter (Barbara Comyns): The Offing, The Slaves of Solitude, Lolly Willowes, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child, Wish Her Safe at Home, The Pumpkin Eater, Basic Black with Pearls

The Offing

Author	Benjamin Myers
ISBN	1526611317

After all, there are only a few things truly worth fighting for: freedom, of course, and all that it brings with it. Poetry, perhaps, and a good glass of wine. A nice meal. Nature. Love, if you're lucky.

One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham...

The Slaves of Solitude

Author	Patrick Hamilton
ISBN	1590172205

England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter.

Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated...

Lolly Willowes

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,...

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...

Wish Her Safe at Home

Author

Stephen Benatar

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city--and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity,...

The Pumpkin Eater

Author	Penelope Mortimer
ISBN	0747518874

4.5 stars rounded up
I must admit I haven’t read anything by Mortimer before and on the evidence of this book I should have. It is about a woman in a downward spiral and is an acerbic and humorous (in a very bleak way) comment on marriage, gender relations and being a woman being controlled by men (husbands...

Basic Black with Pearls

Author	Helen Weinzweig
ISBN	1487000472

A lost feminist classic — and winner of the Toronto Book Award — reissued to coincide with the 35th anniversary of publication.

In her yearning, elusive search for a lover, Shirley Kaszenbowski sheds her drab “basic black” existence together with torturous memories of guilt and...