Showing results by author "Jane Gardam" in All Categories

The barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bill and Harry, two children who find wonder at every turn as they experience the Hollow Land. Everyday challenges give a daring edge to this rural work and play. There are mysteries to explore and uncover, like the case of the Egg Witch, and everyone is curious about the Household Name, a visitor from London, moving into the jewel of the territory, Light Farm.

'I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal having had a violent experience at the age of nine'. Jessica Vye's 'violent experience' colours her schooldays and her reaction to the world around her - a confining world of wartime restrictions, Viyella dresses, nicely-restrained essays and dusty tea shops. For Jessica has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer.

This delightful novel describes the post-war summer of 1946 - and follows the growing-up of three young women in the months between leaving school and taking up their scholarships at university. Una Vane, whose widowed mother runs a hairdressing salon in her front room, goes bicycling with Ray, the boy who delivers the fish and milk. Hetty Fallowes struggles to become independent of her possessive, loving, tactless mother. And Lieselotte Klein, uncovers tragedy in the past and magic in the present.

In 1904, when she was six, Polly Flint went to live with her two holy aunts at the yellow house by the marsh - so close to the sea that it seemed to toss like a ship, so isolated that she might have been marooned on an island. And there she stayed for 81 years, while the century raged around her, while lamplight and Victorian order became chaos and nuclear dread. Crusoe's Daughter, ambitious, moving and wholly original, is her story.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize. Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife, Betty. Last Friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth's great rival in work and - though it was never spoken of - in love.

Throughout her career prize-winning novelist Jane Gardam has been writing glorious short stories, each one hallmarked with all the originality, poignancy, wry comedy, and narrative brilliance of her longer fiction. Passion and longing, metamorphosis and enchantment are Gardam's themes, and like a magician she plucks them from the quietest of corners: from Wimbledon gardens and cold churches, from London buses and industrial backstreets.

Filth ( Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the war. Reserved, immaculate, and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions.

But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese internment camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the bar - the brash, forceful Veneering.

Long ago, Old Filth was a Raj orphan - one of the many young children sent 'home' from the East to be fostered and educated in England. Jane Gardam's novel tells his story, from his birth in what was then Malaya to the extremities of his old age. In so doing, she not only encapsulates a whole period from the glory days of British Empire, through the Second World War, to the present and beyond, but also illuminates the complexities of the character known variously as Eddie, the Judge, Fevvers, Filth, Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy and Sir Edward Feathers.

A rather mysterious old clergyman is dead, and his daughter, 16-year-old Athene is desolate. A beauty, she is also lonely and living a fantasy life. Athene’s mother dispatches her to spend the holidays with assorted friends and relatives. And for Athene that golden summer after the funeral becomes delicious fodder for her fantasy.

Marigold Green calls herself ‘hideous, quaint and barmy’. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill’s daughter. Growing up in a boys’ school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.

During one glorious summer between the wars, the realities of life and the sexual ritual dance of the adult world creep into the life of young Margaret Marsh. Her father, preaching the doctrine of the unsavoury Primal Saints; her mother, bitterly nostalgic for what might have been; Charles and Binkie, anchored in the past and a game of words; dying Mrs Frayling and Lydia the maid, given to the vulgar enjoyment of life - all contribute to Margaret's shattering moment of truth.

When sweet, healthy, hearty Holly Fox dies suddenly in childbirth, the Surrey village reverberates with shock. She leaves behind a helpless, silent husband and a tiny daughter, Faith. Everyone assumes Holly's loving and capable mother will look after Faith, but when she unaccountably deserts her newborn grandchild, the baby must be packed off to her father's peculiar family in the North...

It is a wet day in Dorset, and walking to a luncheon party is Sir Edward Feathers QC, followed by two elderly friends: his scruffy neighbour and sparring partner, Veneering, and Fiscal-Smith, the meanest lawyer ever to make a fortune at the Bar. Fans of Jane Gardam's bestselling novel, Old Filth, will be delighted to encounter Filth, now almost ninety, making his immaculate way to Privilege Hill.

Jane Gardam reveals again her brilliant diversity and deep understanding of the human condition. In "Light", an evocative, lyrical piece of magic realism, a beautiful Himalayan girl defies the destiny laid out for her by her mother but in so doing destroys the village in which she was born. In "Missing the Midnight", a young woman, having failed her exams and lost the man she loves, journeys home on Christmas Eve to the family she despises.

Acclaimed as Jane Gardams masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical series that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself. They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.

Eliza, 51, schreibt Briefe an Joan, die Nachbarin, die offenbar ihren Mann und ihre Kinder verlassen hat, und die sie eigentlich kaum kennt. Briefe mit besten Ratschlägen – voller ungeschminkter Wahrheiten, schlafwandlerisch sicher gesetzter Seitenhiebe und Exzentrik. Antwort bekommt Eliza nie, was ihre Schreibwut eher anstachelt. Als ihr Mann Henry plötzlich auszieht, geraten die Briefe zu immer wilderen, fiebrigen Bekenntnissen einer zutiefst einsamen, in ihrem Leben gefangenen Frau, der nicht unbedingt zu trauen ist.

Alles an Edward Feathers ist ohne Fehl und Tadel - seine Garderobe, seine Manieren und sein Ruf als glänzender Anwalt. Nun ist er alt und muss mit dem Tod seiner Frau Betty zurechtkommen, so wie er immer mit allem zurechtgekommen ist. Nie hat er darüber gesprochen, wie es war, als Vierjähriger aus einer glücklichen Kindheit in Malaysia gerissen und zu einer hartherzigen Pflegemutter nach Wales verschickt zu werden. Seine perfekte Haltung täuscht alle und manchmal sogar ihn selbst. Doch mit Bettys Tod bricht etwas in ihm auf. Und so setzt er sich an einem Wintermorgen ans Steuer seines Wagens und fährt los, das eigene Leben zu erkunden.

In a rare New York appearance, the beloved British author of Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat, the funny, romantic and surprising paired novels about a 50-year marriage between a crusty British barrister and his sparkling surprising Betty, discusses these books and Last Friends, her brand-new third chapter in this remarkable series. Paul Hecht will read from the book. In conversation with Stacy Schiff ( Cleopatra).

Ein wundervoller Sommerroman - die Geschichte einer bedingungslosen Freundschaft London ist laut und anstrengend, die Batemans sehnen sich nach Ruhe und haben sich für den Sommer auf dem Land in Yorkshire eingemietet. Vor allem der Vater, ein nervöser Journalist, hofft auf Entspannung in der bäuerlichen Umgebung. Hier trifft sein kleiner Sohn Harry auf Bell, den jüngsten Sohn der Vermieter, und eine tiefe Jungenfreundschaft beginnt.

Ein flirrender Sommerroman an der englischen Küste von der großen Erzählerin Jane Gardamy. Es ist Sommer, und Margaret ist acht und schwer genervt: Der frischgeborene Bruder ist hässlich und schreit, die Mutter hat sich in ein träge stillendes Wesen verwandelt, der Vater predigt gegen die Verderbtheit der Welt. Einmal in der Woche kann Margaret der Langeweile zu Hause entfliehen: Mittwoch ist Ausflugstag mit Lydia, dem neuen Hausmädchen, die mit ihrer selbstbewussten Körperlichkeit und handfesten Sprache in diese Familie platzt und als einzige Erwachsene wirklich zu wissen scheint, was sie will − Spaß.