The People on Privilege Hill and Other Stories
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,...
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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.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781933372563 (1933372567)
Publish date: August 1st 2008
Publisher: Europa Editions
Pages no: 196
Edition language: English
bookshelves: hardback, lit-richer, paper-read, shortstory-shortstories-novellas, published-2007, under-500-ratings, cover-love, one-penny-wonder, autumn-2015, bedside Read from August 28 to September 30, 2015 Description: Jane Gardam's delightful short stories range from the Lake District to Do...
Gardam is probably the UK's best short story writer. This collection can't meet the brilliance of for example Going into a Dark House, but it comes very close.
I rarely read short stories, but this was good. I enjoyed the quick pace of reading many different stories in one book. Some of these stories are surprising. The author has a way with detail and although some may start out slow, they end up grabbing you before the ending.