Book description
When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she
decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest
Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed
Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken
wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful
Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine; and crazed old
Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years.
But Flora loves nothing better than to organize other people. Armed
with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the
family in hand. A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas,
Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.
Includes an introduction by Lynne Truss, and a letter from the
author to Anthony Pookworthy in the foreword.
Stella Dorothea Gibbons, novelist, poet and short-story writer,
was born in London in 1902. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her other novels
are Miss Linsey and Pa (1936), Nightingale Wood (1938), Westwood
(1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Beside the Pearly
Water (1954). Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist. She is the author of the
number one bestseller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has sold more
than two million copies, won the national British Book Award, and was
on the New York Times bestseller list or forty-five weeks. She lives
in Brighton, England.
