New Releases by Jane Gardam

Second in the Old Filth trilogy. "An astute, subtle depiction of marriage . . . absolutely wonderful" ( The Washington Post). Acclaimed as Jane Gardam''s masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical novel that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself. They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s. As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the fifty-year union of two remarkable people, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a triumph. Fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power, it will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and thoroughly satisfying. "Funny and affecting . . . It''s remarkable." — The New York Times Book Review "The latest occasion to celebrate Gardam . . . [a] superb novel." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR "Told with quintessentially British humor . . . Gardam''s prose is witty and precise." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "It''s magnificent. . . . Funny, intelligent and immensely moving." — Kirkus Reviews

Eddie Feathers è un bambino timido e balbuziente nato in Malesia da un funzionario coloniale inglese e trasferito d’autorità nella madrepatria per compiervi gli studi. Sir Edward Feathers è un celebre ex avvocato nonché stimato ex giudice, ormai in pensione, che affronta la vecchiaia nel suo buen retiro del Dorset dopo una brillante carriera trascorsa nel possedimento inglese di Hong Kong. Tra questi due aspetti dello stesso personaggio c’è una vita intera, un’infanzia difficile, una maturità conquistata a fatica sullo sfondo della seconda guerra mondiale e della fine del Raj. L’opera di Jane Gardam è un quadro impressionista, tanto è il predominio delle sensazioni; è un affresco di atmosfere estremamente british raccontate con grazia, umorismo e nostalgia. Lo stile perfetto dell’autrice ci accompagna in una successione mozzafiato di episodi toccanti dove i flashback si mischiano con i ricordi, dove il delirio senile si confonde con la saggezza dell’esperienza, dove la costante ricerca di un briciolo d’amore si scontra con il formalismo e la rigidità di intere generazioni britanniche che alla salvaguardia del Raj hanno sacrificato i più elementari affetti familiari. Un libro spietato e commovente insieme, pervaso dal sottile humour inglese, che ci porta curiosamente a considerare la vecchiaia, spettro dei nostri tempi edonistici, come nient’altro che una versione dell’infanzia: i due estremi si toccano, l’irrazionalità infantile o senile ci fa sorridere mentre volenti o nolenti ci troviamo a riflettere, forse con una punta d’amarezza, sull’età adulta che costituisce il grosso dell’esistenza.

"Engrossing stories of hilarity and heartbreak" from the Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy ( The Seattle Times). A collection of stories from a writer at the height of her powers—a celebrated stylist admired for her caustic humor, freewheeling imagination, love of humanity, and wicked powers of observation. This is a delightful grouping of stories, witty and wise, that includes the return of Sir Edward Feathers, "Old Filth" himself. "[Gardam''s] stories, like delicate tapestries, are alight with colors." — The Times (London) "When Gardam hits her mark, like other exemplary short-story writers such as William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Taylor, she can be dazzling." — The Guardian "Gardam''s brisk narration and fearless temperament make for serious fun." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Wry, economical and perpetually surprising, these 14 stories from English novelist Gardam follow the last of the intrepid, stiff upper lip WWII generation of British ladies and gentlemen. . . . Gardam vividly evokes an age of iron wills." — Publishers Weekly "Gardam displays the consummate skill of the short-story-teller, which is that of the caricaturist, the ability to capture a personality in a few brief strokes. . . . Privilege Hill is a collection of gentle stories that you could read to your grandmother, with the kind of sharp wit that would no doubt give her a secret smile. But they''re deeper than they look . . . so don''t read them all at once." — The Bookbag

First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. "Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters" ( The New York Times Book Review). Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away. Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling''s "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" that retraces much of the twentieth century''s torrid and momentous history. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE "Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and—a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture—adult." — The Washington Post "Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting." — The Seattle Times "A masterpiece of storytelling." — The Dallas Morning News

Two stories about two girls and two horses on two hill farms.

Roman d''aventures - hiver - enfant - animal - relation (psychologie).

Bridget loved her pony, William, and it was difficult for her to have everybody make fun of him all the time. Then one day, when a big snowstorm strands Bridget''s family, William saves the day. A story that will gladden the hearts of children.

Faith Fox has led a life full of heartbreak and abandonment, lacking in simplicity and love-and she''s not even one week old. She has suffered the unexpected and inexplicable loss of her mother in childbirth; her father, an overworked doctor grown callous with stress, has neither the ability nor the interest to take on the difficult task of raising his child alone; her grandmother, Thomasina, has decided to abscond to Egypt with a retired general rather than acknowledge and accept the loss of her daughter, whom she loved so distressingly well. And so Faith finds herself improbably at the rearing of her father''s brother, Jack, an ascetic priest whose current endeavor is an occult "experimental community" comprised mainly of expatriate Tibetans. What ensues is a brilliant comedy of manners that revives the tradition begun by Jane Austen-an endlessly charming passage through the North and South of England that finally gives a major and lavishly gifted award-winning British writer the American readership she so richly deserves.

This book contains stunning black and white photographs by award-winning photographers Harland Walshaw and Peter Burton and is accompanied by a poetic and evocative text which describes this beautiful and little-known part of Yorkshire.

Two girls lose interest in playing with their doll house after moving from London to Wales but the dolls in the house amuse themselves by telling stories about their exciting pasts.

Set in South London, told entirely in the form of letters, this is an exploration of the imagination - the real world and fantasy - of a woman under terrible stress. The book was awarded the 1991 Whitbread Novel of the Year award.

Young Harry Bateman comes from London with his family year after year to spend the summer at Arboles Claros Farm in the Cumbrian fells country, until he feels that it is his real home.

With her customary accuracy, Jane Gardam reveals the extraordinariness of ordinary people as she deals with the pangs of love- fulfilled or hopeless, sexual or spiritual, tortured or hilarious- in these eleven stories. Paraded here are ladies with a ''thing'' about vicars, strange events happening in ornate downstairs lavatories (and in ornate upstairs ones), and the English abroad, desperate and dotty. The glum and impossible Edna haunts the supermarket- and dispenses an unlikely kiss of life. The younger sister of Hans Christian Andersen''s Little Mermaid declares her sibling ''very silly'' and turns her story on its tail, an old maid forms a curious liason with a tramp, and small moments of temptation fill hotel rooms as histories glance briefly off each other.

When her father breaks his leg and everything goes wrong on their farm, seven-year-old Kit, who has the reputation of being a cry-baby, proves to her family that she can be brave in times of crisis.