Jane Gardam's funny and wise masterpiece, reissued with a new introduction by Nina Stibbe'Old Filth has stayed with me for years'SATHNAM SANGHERA'Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny'HILARY MANTEL'The last great book I read'RACHEL WEISZ'Gardam's masterpiece'GUARDIANFilth, in his heydey, was an international lawye...

'Gardam writes about love, death, loneliness, money and madness with gentle ferocity. The Old Filth trilogy should be read by anyone who has ever been interested in how we become who we are' Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday'Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers' Hilary Mantel'This humorous, melancholic final volume establishes the trilogy as a modern classic'

A short story by Jane Gardam from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.In ‘It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies’, a young woman tells the story of her grandmother’s 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 Brontë’s game-changing novel and its beloved na...

Jane Austen's 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 ...

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 SUNDAYOld Filth told the sto...

'Touching, terribly sad, funny: a smashing novel' The 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 England's 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, ...

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.Athene's 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 f...

Her territory isn't young or old; it's the heart-and brain-matter of people, their desires and worries and fantasies and intricate interactions. All of this is set capably against a particular landscape, and the result tends to be vivid and real. Beautiful, like Willa Cather' Meg Wolitzer, New York TimesThe barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bill and Harry, two children who find wonder at every turn as the...

The flag that is shown, literally and metaphorically, by these characters is always the Union Jack. Gardam's stories are acutely observed social commentaries on Englishness, its weaknesses and its illusions.

'She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie'Terribly funny & clever ... the best thing she's done' Victoria Wood'Brilliant on sex, brilliant on bereavement and death, brilliant on god, brilliant on dottiness' A. N. Wilson, Evening StandardWhen sweet, healthy hearty Holly Fox dies suddenly in childbirth, the Surrey village whose pearl she was reverberates wit...

'A meticulously observed modern classic' IndependentDuring one glorious summer between the wars, the realities of life and the sexual ritual dance of the adult world creep into the life of young Margaret Marsh. Her father, preaching the doctrine of the unsavoury Primal Saints; her mother, bitterly nostalgic for what might have been; Charles and Binkie, anchored in the past and a game of words; dying Mrs Frayling and Lydia the maid, given to the vulgar en...

'Excellently done . . . Manic delusions have never been so persuasive . . . Very moving when it is not being exceedingly funny' Anita Brookner'An ingenious, funny, satirical, sad story . . . Vivid and poignant' Independent on Sunday'Wickedly comic . . . masterly and hugely enjoyable' Daily MailEliza Peabody is one of those dangerously blameless women who believes she has God in her pocket. She is t...