Barbara Pym Knihy

A classic comedy of manners from Barbara Pym, the acclaimed author of Quartet in Autumn, Jane and Prudence and Excellent Women

Set in St Basil's, a North London parish, Barbara Pym's novel is full of high comedy. Her depiction of characters begins with Mark the vicar, and his wife Sophia who is quite obsessed with cats, as is Daisy Pettigrew, the vet's sister.

Here, Barbara Mary Crampton Pym sails off into a wickedly comedic farce, focusing on the unsuitable romantic entanglements of a curate and a pretty young girl, both of whom live in the same rooming house, and a starry-eyed university professor and his female student.

It is surely appropriate that anthropologists, who spend their time studying life and behavior in various societies, should be studied in their turn, says Barbara Pym. In a wonderful twist on her subjects, she has written a book inspecting the behavior o

Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good looking and fairly young - but very bored. Her husband Rodney, a handsome army major, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like to think she has changed rather less. Her interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the more serious-minded company of three unmarried priests, and, of course, Piers Longridge, a man of an unfathomably different character altogether.

A charming and funny tale of parish life by an author whose many fans include Philip Larkin, Alexander McCall Smith and Jilly Cooper.

Quartet in autumn is the story of four people in late middle-age who work in the same office and who all suffer from loneliness. Poignantly and with humour, Pym takes us through their small lives and the facades they erect to defend themselves against the outside world.

This volume includes an early novel and three novellas, which were discovered and published after Barbara Pym's death in 1980.

'One of her very best - comic, heartrending, brave; in short, like life itself' Shirley Hazzard

Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather'. As such, she often gets herself embroiled in other people's lives - especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks. One cannot take sides in these matters, though it is tricky, especially as Mildred, teetering on the edge of spinsterhood, has a soft spot for dashing young Rockingham Napier. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest and most touching.