Happy Returns
Published on 23. January 2024
364 pages
978-1-5040-9110-7 (ISBN)
Description
"Her writing celebrates the solid parochial English virtues of stiff-upper-lippery, good-sportingness,[and] dislike of fuss.... Light, witty, easygoing books." -
The New Yorker
As 1951 draws to a close, Christmas approaches-but the conservative upper class of Barsetshire have already received the gift they really wanted: Winston Churchill's re-election as prime minister. Nevertheless, their individual struggles carry on. A member of the House of Lords worries that marriage is not in the cards for him due to an insufficient fortune, while another man does manage to get engaged-but frets that his betrothed doesn't truly love him. The widow Lady Lufton misses her husband-as well as the money she's lost to taxes. And an aspiring scholar falls madly in love, but must choose between Oxford and the object of his affections...
"[This] characteristically witty, nostalgic... novel in the beloved Barsetshire series describes the lingering effects of WWII on the fictional village that Thirkell adapted from its Victorian inventor and chronicler, Anthony Trollope." - Publishers Weekly
As 1951 draws to a close, Christmas approaches-but the conservative upper class of Barsetshire have already received the gift they really wanted: Winston Churchill's re-election as prime minister. Nevertheless, their individual struggles carry on. A member of the House of Lords worries that marriage is not in the cards for him due to an insufficient fortune, while another man does manage to get engaged-but frets that his betrothed doesn't truly love him. The widow Lady Lufton misses her husband-as well as the money she's lost to taxes. And an aspiring scholar falls madly in love, but must choose between Oxford and the object of his affections...
"[This] characteristically witty, nostalgic... novel in the beloved Barsetshire series describes the lingering effects of WWII on the fictional village that Thirkell adapted from its Victorian inventor and chronicler, Anthony Trollope." - Publishers Weekly
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Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was a British author whose ability to produce one book a year, every year, and
set in that year blurred the lines between novelist and social historian. Like so many of the writers that she admired-Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot-Thirkell shared their X-ray vision: an unmatched ability to assess the hypocrisies, desires, and prejudices of her characters and, better still, play them for laughs. Her biggest literary project, the Barsetshire Chronicles, consists of twenty-nine novels, each acting as another slice of English country life; a utopian vision of bucolic countryside, grand manors, and village fêtes.
