Showing results by author "Jane Gardam" in All Categories

In a rare New York appearance, the beloved British author of Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat, the funny, romantic and surprising paired novels about a 50-year marriage between a crusty British barrister and his sparkling surprising Betty, discusses these books and Last Friends, her brand-new third chapter in this remarkable series. Paul Hecht will read from the book. In conversation with Stacy Schiff ( Cleopatra).

Jane Gardam reveals again her brilliant diversity and deep understanding of the human condition. In "Light", an evocative, lyrical piece of magic realism, a beautiful Himalayan girl defies the destiny laid out for her by her mother but in so doing destroys the village in which she was born. In "Missing the Midnight", a young woman, having failed her exams and lost the man she loves, journeys home on Christmas Eve to the family she despises.

The three-day Folio Prize Fiction Festival 2014 brought together some great writers and audiences and gave them a real opportunitey to talk in depth about their work and similar subjects. The festival included interviews and discussions with top writers, novelists, poets, critics and publishers, including Eimear McBride, Paul Baggaley, Sergio De La Pava, Rachel Kushner, Sarah Hall, Pankaj Mishra, Stephanie Merritt, Jane Gardam and Mark Haddon.

In 1904, when she was six, Polly Flint went to live with her two holy aunts at the yellow house by the marsh - so close to the sea that it seemed to toss like a ship, so isolated that she might have been marooned on an island. And there she stayed for 81 years, while the century raged around her, while lamplight and Victorian order became chaos and nuclear dread. Crusoe's Daughter, ambitious, moving and wholly original, is her story.

A rather mysterious old clergyman is dead, and his daughter, 16-year-old Athene is desolate. A beauty, she is also lonely and living a fantasy life. Athene’s mother dispatches her to spend the holidays with assorted friends and relatives. And for Athene that golden summer after the funeral becomes delicious fodder for her fantasy.

When sweet, healthy, hearty Holly Fox dies suddenly in childbirth, the Surrey village reverberates with shock. She leaves behind a helpless, silent husband and a tiny daughter, Faith. Everyone assumes Holly's loving and capable mother will look after Faith, but when she unaccountably deserts her newborn grandchild, the baby must be packed off to her father's peculiar family in the North...

During 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 enjoyment of life - all contribute to Margaret's shattering moment of truth.

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.

Marigold Green calls herself ‘hideous, quaint and barmy’. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill’s daughter. Growing up in a boys’ school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.

This delightful novel describes the post-war summer of 1946 - and follows the growing-up of three young women in the months between leaving school and taking up their scholarships at university. Una Vane, whose widowed mother runs a hairdressing salon in her front room, goes bicycling with Ray, the boy who delivers the fish and milk. Hetty Fallowes struggles to become independent of her possessive, loving, tactless mother. And Lieselotte Klein, uncovers tragedy in the past and magic in the present.

'I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal having had a violent experience at the age of nine'. Jessica Vye's 'violent experience' colours her schooldays and her reaction to the world around her - a confining world of wartime restrictions, Viyella dresses, nicely-restrained essays and dusty tea shops. For Jessica has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer.

The barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bill and Harry, two children who find wonder at every turn as they experience the Hollow Land. Everyday challenges give a daring edge to this rural work and play. There are mysteries to explore and uncover, like the case of the Egg Witch, and everyone is curious about the Household Name, a visitor from London, moving into the jewel of the territory, Light Farm.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize. Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife, Betty. Last Friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth's great rival in work and - though it was never spoken of - in love.

Filth ( Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the war. Reserved, immaculate, and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions.

But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese internment camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the bar - the brash, forceful Veneering.

Throughout her career prize-winning novelist Jane Gardam has been writing glorious short stories, each one hallmarked with all the originality, poignancy, wry comedy, and narrative brilliance of her longer fiction. Passion and longing, metamorphosis and enchantment are Gardam's themes, and like a magician she plucks them from the quietest of corners: from Wimbledon gardens and cold churches, from London buses and industrial backstreets.