Book description
It is a wet day in Dorset, and walking to a luncheon party is Sir
Edward Feathers QC, followed by two elderly friends: his scruffy
neighbour and sparring partner, Veneering, and Fiscal-Smith, the meanest
lawyer ever to make a fortune at the Bar. Fans of Jane Gardam's
bestselling novel, OLD FILTH, will be delighted to encounter Filth, now
almost ninety, making his immaculate way to Privilege Hill, named
perhaps for the Prive-Lieges who arrived with the Normans, but more
probably for the village privies.
Ranging from a Victorian mansion converted into a home for unmarried
mothers to a wartime hospital in the middle of the Blitz, from ghost
stories to brilliant observations of love and loneliness in their
various manifestations - including, in 'Pangbourne', a woman who falls
in love with a gorilla - to reflections on the haphazard nature of
intellect and memories in 'The Last Reunion', the stories in this
collection mix Jane Gardam's trademark sardonic wit with a delicate
tenderness and a touch of the surreal. Jane Gardam has been awarded
the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the
enjoyment of literature. She has twice won a Whitbread Award and has
been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her most recent novel, OLD FILTH,
was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2005. She was awarded an OBE in
January 2009.
