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Showing 1 - 9 of
9 matches in All Departments
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Mr Fox (Paperback)
Barbara Comyns
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R267
Discovery Miles 2 670
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily
married to a young painter called Charles. An artist's model with
an eccentric collection of pets, she is ill-equipped to cope with
the bohemian London of the 1930s, where poverty, babies (however
much loved) and husband conspire to torment her. Hoping to add some
spice to her life, Sophia takes up with Peregrine, a dismal, ageing
critic, and comes to regret her marriage - and her affair. But in
this case virtue is more than its own reward, for repentance brings
an abrupt end to the cycle of unsold pictures, unpaid bills and
unwashed dishes ...
Growing up in Edwardian south London, Alice Rowlands longs for
romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary,
restrictive and lonely. Her father, a vet, is harsh and
domineering; his new girlfriend brash and lascivious. Alice seeks
refuge in memories and fantasies, in her rapturous longing for
Nicholas, a handsome young sailor, and in the blossoming of what
she perceives as her occult powers. A series of strange events
unfolds that leads her, dressed in bridal white, to a scene of
ecstatic triumph and disaster among the crowds on Clapham Common.
The Vet's Daughter is a uniquely vivid, witty and touching story of
love and mystery.
Fiction. This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English
village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in
the drawing-room windows, "quacking their approval" as they sail
around the room. "What about my rose beds?" demands Grandmother
Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is
submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a
bunch. Then the miller drowns himself...then the butcher slits his
throat...and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The
newspaper asks, "Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?"
Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as
it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published
in England in 1954, this "overlooked small masterpiece" is a
twisted, tragicomic gem.
On the banks of the River Avon, five sisters are born. The seasons
come and go, the girls take their lessons under the ash tree, and
always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. Then,
unexpectedly, an air of decay descends upon the house: ivy grows
unchecked over the windows, angry shouts split the summer air, the
milk sours in the larder and their father takes out his gun.
Tragedy strikes the family, and before long the furniture is being
auctioned off and the sisters dispersed among relatives. In her
daring first novel, originally published in 1947, Barbara Comyns'
unique young heroine relates the vivid, funny and bittersweet story
of a childhood.
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Discovery Miles 5 090
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