The Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Then, into their quiet lives comes a famous librarian, Nathaniel Mold, and a bishop from Africa, Theodore Grote - who each take to calling on the sisters for rather unsettling reasons....
Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who are often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the ga...
1983 Perennial Library MASS MARKET PAPERBACK, 5th printing. Barbara Pym (No Fond Return of Love: A Novel). This is the story of four people in late middle-age - Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia - whose chief point of contact is that they work in the s...
1980, mass market paperback reprint edition, later printing, Harper Perennial Library, NY. 208 pages. "Every paragraph of her work is dense with psychological insight ... and simultaneously, very funny." Often referred to as "the most neglected novel...
'I closed my eyes and prayed for myself, on this my thirty-third birthday, for my husband Rodney, my mother-in-law Sybil, and a vague collection of friends who always seem to need praying for. When I opened my eyes again I had caught a glimpse of the...
Barbara Pym was an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives. With warmth, humour, precision and great vividness, she gave her best characters an independent life we recognise as totally familiar. In A Few Green Leaves, her last novel, her her...
Catherine Oliphant is a writer and lives with handsome anthropologist Tom Mallow. When he begins a romance with student Deirdre Swann, Catherine turns her attention to Alaric Lydgate, who has a fondness for wearing African masks....
This early novel by Barbara Pym captures the charm and folly of English middle-class life. The two title characters share a devoted friendship based on memories of Oxford school days, poetry and their neighbors' private affairs- all discussed over le...
'I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym' Richard Osman‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure.' Jilly Cooper‘The day comes in the life of every single man living alone when he mus...
Three lonely people come together in this poignant, witty novel of star-crossed romance from the New York Times–bestselling author of Jane and Prudence.
After being jilted by her fiancé, Dulcie Mainwaring despairs of e...
A novel featuring a pair of farcical romances captures early versions of the author's famous clergymen and excellent women, the original Miss Doggett and Jessie Morrow from Jane and Prudence, and a distinctly Oxford cast of characters...
Caroline Grimstone, the bored young wife of an ambitious anthropologist, finds a cure for her tedium in reading to the elderly and becoming a party to her husband's purloining of an important manuscript...
Thanks to his wife''s money, Adam Marsh-Gibbon leads a charmed life writing poetry and novels celebrated mostly by his fellow residents in the town of Up Callow in Shropshire, England. His lovely wife Cassandra caters to his every whim, although perh...
Life has a certain reassuring if not terribly exciting rhythm for the residents of North Oxford. Miss Morrow is content in her position as spinster companion to Miss Doggett, even if her employer and the woman’s social circle regard her as a piece ...
‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure.' Jilly Cooper‘Could one write a book based on one’s diaries over thirty years? I certainly have enough material,’ wrote Barba...