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...

"Originally published in 1977, Jane Gardam's Bilgewater is an affectionate and complex rendering-in-miniature of the discomforts of growing up and first love seen through the eyes of inimitable Marigold Green, an awkward, eccentric, highly intelligent girl. The Evening Standard described Bilgewater as "one of the funniest, most entertaining, most unusual stories about young love." Motherless and 16, Marigold is the headmaster's daughter at a private...

Jane Gardam's beloved Old Filth Trilogy-including her masterpiece, Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends-are here presented in one volume. Emotionally distant but highly successful Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth, a man who his beautiful wife Betty, and his devilishly handsome professional rival (and Betty's onetime lover) Edward Veneering are the anchors of this series, with each novel focusing on a different character. Feathers...

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).

"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...

Emotionally abandoned by her father and maternal grandmother when her birth results in her mother's death, young Faith Fox is raised by an unlikely group, including the owners of a commune and her bickering paternal grandparents.

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...

This collection of original stories by today's finest women writers--including Tracy Chevalier, Francine Prose, Elizabeth McCracken, Tessa Hadley, Audrey Niffenegger, and more--takes inspiration from the opening line in Charlotte Brontë's most beloved novel, Jane Eyre. A fixture in the literary canon, Charlotte Brontë is revered by readers all over the world. Her novels featuring unforgettable, strong heroines still resonate with millions today....