Jane Gardam

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...

The Whitbread Award-winning author of the Old Filth trilogy captures a moment in time for three young women on the cusp of adulthood. Yorkshire, 1946. The end of the war has changed the world again, and, emboldened by this new dawning, Hetty Fallows, Una Vane, and Lieselotte Klein seize the opportunities with enthusiasm. Hetty, desperate to escape the grasp of her critical mother, books a solo holiday to the Lake District under the pretext of completing...

"In prose vibrant and witty, The Queen of the Tambourine traces the emotional breakdown-and eventual restoration-of Eliza Peabody, a smart and wildly imaginative woman who has become unbearably isolated in her prosperous London neighborhood. Eliza must reach the depths of her downward spiral before she can once again find health and serenity. This story of a woman's confrontation with the realities of sanity will delight readers who enjoy the works...

When Polly Flint was six, she was sent to live with her two pious aunts in a yellow house close to the Irish Sea. To the lonely orphan this bleak coast of England was so isolated she might have been marooned on an island. For Polly, the world of books, especially Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with whose hero she will conduct a lifelong dialogue, became a source of emotional and intellectual nourishment. Soon the worlds of imagination and reality had only...

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

Jane Gardam's marvelous stories of young girls on the threshold of womanhood-God on the Rocks and Crusoe's Daughter-have delighted fans and critics alike. These modern classics are now joined by a novel that is equally fresh and genuine, comic and touching. Jessica Vye introduces herself with an enigmatic pronouncement: "I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine." A revered...

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 her brand-new third chapter in this remarkable series, Last Friends. Paul Hecht will read from the book. In conversation with Stacy Schiff (Cleopatra).

The stories in this collection showcase Gardam's stylistic versatility and psychological insight. Throughout the collection she probes the inner lives, secret desires, and hidden pasts of her characters.