**‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure’ - Jilly Cooper‘I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym’ - Richard Osman**‘Could one write a book based on one’s diaries over thirty years? I certainly have enough material,’ wroteBarbara Pym. This book, selected from the diaries, notebooks and letters of this much-loved novelist to form a continuous narrative, is indeed a unique autobiography, providing a priv...

‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure.' Jilly Cooper‘Could one write a book based on one’s diaries over thirty years? I certainly have enough material,’ wrote Barbara Pym. This book, selected from the diaries, notebooks and letters of this much loved novelist to form a continuous narrative, is indeed a unique autobiography, providing a privileged insight into a writer’s mind.Phili...

Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other p...

'I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym' Richard Osman‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure.' Jilly Cooper‘The day comes in the life of every single man living alone when he must give a dinner party.’The parish of St Basil, on the fringes of North Kensington, is all of a flutter due to the arrival of Rupert Stonebird, a most eligible bachelor, in t...

Shortlisted for the 1977 Booker PrizeThis is the story of four people in late middle-age - Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia - whose chief point of contact is that they work in the same office and they suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly, poignantly, satirically and with much humour, Pym conducts us through their small lives and the facade they erect to defend themselves against the outside world. There is nevertheless an obstinate optimism in her characte...

Dramatisations and a reading of selected novels by Barbara Pym - plus bonus materialBarbara Pym is one of the 20th Century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in th...

A #1 New York Times Bestseller, Louise Penny's The Long Way Home is an intriguing Chief Inspector Gamache Novel.Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté du Québec, has found a peace he'd only imagined possible. On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. "There is a balm in Gilead," his neighbor Clara Morro...

Instant New York Times bestseller:#1 in Hardcover Fiction#1 in E-book Fiction#1 in Combined Print and E-book Fiction"Deep and grand and altogether extraordinary....Miraculous."—The Washington Post"Artful...Powerful...Magical."- The New York Times Book Review"Superb"- People“A Great Rec...

The Nature of the Beast is a New York Times bestselling Chief Inspector Gamache novel from Louise Penny.Hardly a day goes by when nine year old Laurent Lepage doesn't cry wolf. From alien invasions, to walking trees, to winged beasts in the woods, to dinosaurs spotted in the village of Three Pines, his tales are so extraordinary no one can possibly believe him. Including Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache, who now live in the little Quebec village.

In this Isabel Dalhousie original short story, available exclusively in electronic format, our intrepid heroine—accused by a distraught wife of being the "other woman"—makes a surprising discovery as she attempts to defend her reputation.Summer in Edinburgh is a season of delicate sunshine and showers, picnics with loved ones in blossoming gardens, and genteel celebrations of art and music. But Isabel Dalhousie’s peaceful idyll is broken when a single meeting over ...

In this installment of the beloved Isabel Dalhousie series, Isabel is called upon to navigate complex social situations both at home and in her community.A new baby brings an abundance of joy to Isabel and her husband, Jamie—but almost-four-year-old Charlie refuses to acknowledge Magnus, and Isabel struggles to impress upon her older son the patience and understanding that have guided her throughout her own life.These are the very qualities that bring Bea Shandon, an old ac...

Featuring an all-new cover, New York Times bestseller Bill Bryson's irreverent and hilarious travel memoir through the beloved island nation he called home for two decades. From Downing Street to Loch Ness, this is a delightful look at British culture.Before New York Times bestselling author Bill Bryson wrote The Road to Little Dribbling, he took this delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation of Great Britain, ...