JANE GARDAM

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 Andersens 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.

Edward Feathers, einst Kronanwalt in Hongkong, vollendeter Gentleman, und selbst mit achtzig noch ein schöner Mann, scheint ein mühelos erfolgreiches Leben gehabt zu haben, doch wer kannte ihn schon wirklich? Nicht einmal seiner Frau Betty hat er je erzählt, woher das Stottern kommt, das ihn in Augenblicken großer Aufregung noch immer überwältigt. Als Betty stirbt, bewahrt Feathers wie gewohnt Contenance. Doch eines Morgens setzt er sich ans Steuer seines Wagens und fährt los, das eigene Leben zu erkunden.

* A brilliant, witty and moving novel about keeping the faith in extreme adversity

The third novel in the Old Filth trilogy

RESUMEN

Another masterpiece from Jane Gardam and the second novel in the Old Filth trilogy.

A treasure trove of short stories from the beloved author of the Old Filth trilogy.

This funny and wise masterpiece is being reissued as one of five titles celebrating Abacuss 50th anniversary, with a new introduction from Nina Stibbe

A moving, Booker-shortlisted story of a girls coming of age

* A reissue of one of Jane Gardams best-loved novels

A rather mysterious old clergyman is dead, and his most adoring child, sixteen-year-old Athene is desolate. A statuesque beauty, greatly admired, she is also lonely, untouchable and living a secret life of fairly dangerous fantasy.Athenes mother, at once highly organised and monumentally vague, dispatches her children to spend the holidays with assorted friends and relatives. For Athene, victim of plans gone awry, that golden summer after the funeral becomes deliciously puzzling fodder for her fantasy. Stuck in a seaside hotel with an inarticulate and beautiful boy, marooned in a seaside cottage with a painter, and finally alone in an empty school with a young master, she finds that men are not all as saintly as her father- and that she is far from saintly herself...

Jane Austens love life - long the subject of speculation - is finally, delightfully dealt with in the title story of this collection. Many of the other stories, like The Sidmouth Letters, bring together past and present - with sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, often intensely moving results.With quiet elegance and devastating accuracy, Jane Gardam probes many and varied lives. We meet a trio of Kensington widows, mean-spirited and middle-aged, paying improbable tribute to a long exploited nanny; we await- with dread- a stranger to tea in an Engliish home; we witness the mercurial changes that take place in young love, and we watch as a bohemian, passionate past returns to tempt domestic bliss.

A short story by Jane Gardam from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre. In Its a Mans Life, Ladies, a young woman tells the story of her grandmothers memories of married life. Edited by Tracy Chevalier, the full collection, Reader, I Married Him, brings together some of the finest and most creative voices in fiction today, to celebrate and salute the strength and lasting relevance of Charlotte Brontes game-changing novel and its beloved narrator.

En las sugestivas colinas de Escocia, entre minas abandonadas y ríos subterráneos, dos amigos conocen increíbles historias y viven aventuras unas veces divertidas y otras arriesgadas. Uno es un chico del lugar; el otro un londinense cuya familia ha optado por el encanto de "la tierra hueca".

Touching, terribly sad, funny: a smashing novelThe TimesIn 1904, six-year-old Polly Flint is sent by her sea captain father to live with her two holy aunts in a house by the sea on Englands northeast coast. The house is so close to the sea it seems to toss like a ship, and so isolated, she might be marooned on an island.There Polly lives for 81 years, while the century rages around her and Victorian order becomes nuclear dread. Through it all, she returns again and again to the story of Robinson Crusoe, who, marooned like her, fends off the madness of isolation with imagination.

A loosely connected sequence of stories, offering vignettes of human foibles from the holiday island of Jamaica. Mrs Filling sees something nasty in the midday sun; an English lawyer dallies while his wife goes mad in England; sexuality flares and everywhere farce and racial tension lurk.