New Releases by Jane Gardam

“The satisfying conclusion to Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy offers exquisite prose, wry humor, and keen insights into aging and death” (The New Yorker). While Old Filth introduced readers to Sir Edward Feathers, his dreadful childhood, and his decades-long marriage, The Man in the Wooden Hat was his wife Betty’s story. Last Friends is Terence Veneering’s turn. His beginnings were not those of the usual establishment grandee. Filth’s hated rival in court and in love is the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in the English midlands and a local girl. He escapes the war and later emerges in the Far East as a man of panache and fame. The Bar treats his success with suspicion: Where did this handsome, brilliant Slav come from? This exquisite story of Veneering, Filth, and their circle tells a bittersweet tale of friendship and grace and of the disappointments and consolations of age. They are all, finally, each other’s last friend as this magnificent series ends with the deep and abiding satisfaction that only great literature provides. “[Gardam’s] prose sparkles with wit, compassion and humor. She keeps us entertained, and she keeps us guessing. Be thankful for her books. Be thankful for this trilogy, which is ultimately an elegy, created with deep affection.” —The Washington Post “Restores us to an era rich in spectacle and bristling with insinuation and intrigue. Vivid, spacious, superbly witty, and refreshingly brisk . . . the story (and the author) will endure.” —The Boston Globe “All three Gardam books are beautifully written but it’s a pleasure to note that Last Friends is the most enjoyable, the funniest and the most touching.” —National Post

A delightful short story from Jane Gardam, revisting that Titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Edward Feathers (known to many as Old Filth) in the days after he loses his beloved wife, Betty.

Another masterpiece from Jane Gardam and the second novel in the Old Filth trilogy ''She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight'' CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE ''Witty, subversive, moving'' THE TIMES ''Full of the humour and eccentricity that have made Gardam one of the most enjoyable novelists writing today'' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Old Filth told the story of Sir Edward (Eddie) Feathers QC, aka Filth, his colonial upbringing and career, his long and comfortable marriage, his rivalries and friendships. The Man in the Wooden Hat picks up these threads from the perspective of Filth''s wife, Betty. An orphan of the Japanese internment camps, a free spirit, a clever code-breaker at Bletchley Park, Betty has her own secret passions. No wonder she is drawn to Filth''s hated rival at the Bar, the brash, forceful Veneering.

Old Filth is the nickname for Sir Edward Feathers, a very old judge as the novel opens. His wife has just died and he''s remembering his life, beginning as Raj Orphan when his mother died during his birth in Malaysia. He was raised in Wales with other orphans by a vicious foster mother. He eventually became a successful lawyer and judge in Hong Kong, retiring back to an England he doesn''t recognize anymore. He''s been a proper man of the Imperial Age distinguished by duty and honour and now without his wife, he''s just an lonely icon to an earlier era.

From the award-winning author of Old Filth. “[A] wonderfully old-fashioned novel . . . This post-Victorian charmer is an engrossing delight” (People). In 1904, six-year-old Polly Flint is sent by her sea captain father to live with her aunts in a house by the sea on England’s northeast coast. Orphaned shortly thereafter, Polly will spend the next eighty years stranded in this quiet corner of the world as the twentieth century rages in the background. Through it all, Polly returns again and again to the story of Robinson Crusoe, who, marooned like her, fends off the madness of isolation with imagination. In the Guardian’s series on writers and readers’ favorite comfort books, associate editor Claire Armitstead said of Crusoe’s Daughter, “This is the most bookish of books . . . Every time I return to it, I am comforted by its refusal to conform, its wonderful, boisterous bolshiness, and the intelligence with which it demonstrates that we are what we read.” “Witty, subversive, moving.” —The Times (London) “[A] richly textured novel . . . much occurs on the emotional landscape. We know Polly intimately, and she haunts our imaginations as surely as Crusoe haunts hers . . . a thought-provoking book.” —Library Journal “[The] most seductively entertaining of British novelists.” —Kirkus Reviews

With her customary accuracy, Jane Gardam reveals the extraordinariness of ordinary people as she deals with the pangs of love- fulfilled or hopeless, sexual or spiritual, tortured or hilarious- in these eleven stories. Paraded here are ladies with a ''thing'' about vicars, strange events happening in ornate downstairs lavatories (and in ornate upstairs ones), and the English abroad, desperate and dotty. The glum and impossible Edna haunts the supermarket- and dispenses an unlikely kiss of life. The younger sister of Hans Christian Andersen''s Little Mermaid declares her sibling ''very silly'' and turns her story on its tail, an old maid forms a curious liason with a tramp, and small moments of temptation fill hotel rooms as histories glance briefly off each other.

Eddie Feathers è un bambino timido e balbuziente nato in Malesia da un funzionario coloniale inglese e trasferito d’autorità nella madrepatria per compiervi gli studi. Sir Edward Feathers è un celebre ex avvocato nonché stimato ex giudice, ormai in pensione, che affronta la vecchiaia nel suo buen retiro del Dorset dopo una brillante carriera trascorsa nel possedimento inglese di Hong Kong. Tra questi due aspetti dello stesso personaggio c’è una vita intera, un’infanzia difficile, una maturità conquistata a fatica sullo sfondo della seconda guerra mondiale e della fine del Raj. L’opera di Jane Gardam è un quadro impressionista, tanto è il predominio delle sensazioni; è un affresco di atmosfere estremamente british raccontate con grazia, umorismo e nostalgia. Lo stile perfetto dell’autrice ci accompagna in una successione mozzafiato di episodi toccanti dove i flashback si mischiano con i ricordi, dove il delirio senile si confonde con la saggezza dell’esperienza, dove la costante ricerca di un briciolo d’amore si scontra con il formalismo e la rigidità di intere generazioni britanniche che alla salvaguardia del Raj hanno sacrificato i più elementari affetti familiari. Un libro spietato e commovente insieme, pervaso dal sottile humour inglese, che ci porta curiosamente a considerare la vecchiaia, spettro dei nostri tempi edonistici, come nient’altro che una versione dell’infanzia: i due estremi si toccano, l’irrazionalità infantile o senile ci fa sorridere mentre volenti o nolenti ci troviamo a riflettere, forse con una punta d’amarezza, sull’età adulta che costituisce il grosso dell’esistenza.

A collection of short stories which portray the English character in many ways and situations.

“Engrossing stories of hilarity and heartbreak” from the Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy (The Seattle Times). A collection of stories from a writer at the height of her powers—a celebrated stylist admired for her caustic humor, freewheeling imagination, love of humanity, and wicked powers of observation. This is a delightful grouping of stories, witty and wise, that includes the return of Sir Edward Feathers, “Old Filth” himself. “[Gardam’s] stories, like delicate tapestries, are alight with colors.” —The Times (London) “When Gardam hits her mark, like other exemplary short-story writers such as William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Taylor, she can be dazzling.” —The Guardian “Gardam’s brisk narration and fearless temperament make for serious fun.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Wry, economical and perpetually surprising, these 14 stories from English novelist Gardam follow the last of the intrepid, stiff upper lip WWII generation of British ladies and gentlemen. . . . Gardam vividly evokes an age of iron wills.” —Publishers Weekly “Gardam displays the consummate skill of the short-story-teller, which is that of the caricaturist, the ability to capture a personality in a few brief strokes. . . . Privilege Hill is a collection of gentle stories that you could read to your grandmother, with the kind of sharp wit that would no doubt give her a secret smile. But they’re deeper than they look . . . so don’t read them all at once.” —The Bookbag

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year: “Gardam’s portrait of an insanely imaginative woman in an elusive midlife crisis is impeccably drawn” (The Seattle Times). With prose that is vibrant and witty, The Queen of the Tambourine traces the emotional breakdown—and eventual restoration—of Eliza Peabody, a smart and wildly imaginative woman who has become unbearably isolated in her prosperous London neighborhood. The letters Eliza writes to her neighbor, a woman whom she hardly knows, reveal her self-propelled descent into madness. Eliza must reach the depths of her downward spiral before she can once again find health and serenity. This story of a woman’s confrontation with the realities of sanity will delight readers who enjoy the works of Anita Brookner, Sybille Bedford, Muriel Spark, and Sylvia Plath. “Excellently done . . . Manic delusions have never been so persuasive . . . Very moving when it is not being exceedingly funny.” —Anita Brookner, award-winning author of The Debut “British author Gardam, who won the Whitbread Award for this jigsaw puzzle of a novel, keeps up the suspense to the end, writing like a sorceress in the meantime.” —The Seattle Times “Brilliant.” —The Sunday Times “An ingenious, funny, satirical, sad story . . . Vivid and poignant.” —The Independent on Sunday “Wickedly comic . . . masterly and hugely enjoyable.” —Daily Mail “Marvelously subtle and moving.” —The Times (London)

"The Flight of the Maidens" is an award-winning novelist''s captivating look at postwar England and a summer that changes the lives of three schoolgirls on the brink of womanhood and a new world. An award-winning novelist''s captivating look at postwar England & a summer that changes the lives of three schoolgirls on the brink of womanhood & a new world

Kit lives on a farm. Her parents think she''s a bit of a baby, crying at things like beetles or putting her foot in a cow-pat. But Kit can be brave too, as she shows when the fierce bull gets loose. Kit''s most exciting moment though, is when she is invited to London to be a bridesmaid.

Faith Fox has led a life full of heartbreak and abandonment, lacking in simplicity and love-and she''s not even one week old. She has suffered the unexpected and inexplicable loss of her mother in childbirth; her father, an overworked doctor grown callous with stress, has neither the ability nor the interest to take on the difficult task of raising his child alone; her grandmother, Thomasina, has decided to abscond to Egypt with a retired general rather than acknowledge and accept the loss of her daughter, whom she loved so distressingly well. And so Faith finds herself improbably at the rearing of her father''s brother, Jack, an ascetic priest whose current endeavor is an occult "experimental community" comprised mainly of expatriate Tibetans. What ensues is a brilliant comedy of manners that revives the tradition begun by Jane Austen-an endlessly charming passage through the North and South of England that finally gives a major and lavishly gifted award-winning British writer the American readership she so richly deserves.

A collection of haunting stories___

A collection of short stories. Sister Luke and Sister Reparatrice, out in the convent''s Morris Traveller, have a bizarre adventure; Klaus, who is a stranger to passion, becomes emotional over the delicious food served at a special lunch; a remote Quaker meeting house provides a place of peace for the spirits of a troubled family. In the title story, Going into a dark house, nothing is what it seems, what appears sweet is bitingly hot, and all the reader''s preconceptions are turned on their heads."--Publisher description.

"Three ... stories that were read to the audiences of The Daily Telegraph Cheltenham Festival of Literature in 1991, 1992, and 1993 respectively."--Back cover

Two girls lose interest in playing with their doll house after moving from London to Wales but the dolls in the house amuse themselves by telling stories about their exciting pasts.

Pratt wondered if Henry Wu was real: maybe he was a sort of waxwork - or a very fragile Chinese-china doll. For Henry Wu would not speak and never seemed to listen. But Pratt was in for a big surprise.

Athene''s adored father dies and during the summer following his death she drifts as if in a trance from one bizarre experience to the next, growing up as she goes.

With her customary accuracy, Jane Gardam reveals the extraordinariness of ordinary people as she deals with the pangs of love- fulfilled or hopeless, sexual or spiritual, tortured or hilarious- in these eleven stories. Paraded here are ladies with a ''thing'' about vicars, strange events happening in ornate downstairs lavatories (and in ornate upstairs ones), and the English abroad, desperate and dotty. The glum and impossible Edna haunts the supermarket- and dispenses an unlikely kiss of life. The younger sister of Hans Christian Andersen''s Little Mermaid declares her sibling ''very silly'' and turns her story on its tail, an old maid forms a curious liason with a tramp, and small moments of temptation fill hotel rooms as histories glance briefly off each other.

When the huge white horse cut out of the hillside turf is threatened by a government plan to plant him over with Christmas trees, the village bands together to save him.