Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 30 October 2008.

This is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s first novel for 9 years and it is like welcoming an old friend. This is the story of a group of people brought together in a small West Country town to establish an arts festival. The author has such a keen eye for detail in description of characters and places that you never want to leave them at the end of the last page. A touching and beautiful novel.

Synopsis

A beautiful, very moving, melancholic and elegiac novel set in the late 1960s in Melton, a small town in the West Country. The story revolves around a disparate group of people who come together there to establish an arts festival. There is Jack Curtis a self-made millionaire who has bought and refurbished the local stately home, Florence Plover, a garden designer in her sixties whom he has employed and her Anglo-Greek niece, Persephone. There are the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose family originally owned Melton Hall, who run a failing garden nursery nearby and there is Francis Brock, whose sister Celia, Thomas’s wife, was tragically killed in a car crash some years previously.

This is the story of their intertwining relationships and how they come to love, and not to love each other in different ways and why - a perfect book to curl up and read by the fireside on an autumn afternoon and as satisfying a read as Brief Encounter is a film.

About the Author

Elizabeth Jane Howard is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels and an absorbing and moving memoir, Slipstream, published in 2002. Her Cazalet Chronicles - Casting Off, The Light Years , Making Time and Confusion - have become established as modern classics and were televised by the BBC. In 2000, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation