Barbara Pym was an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives. With warmth, humour, precision and great vividness, she gave her best characters an independent life we recognize as totally familiar. In A Few Green Leaves, her last novel, her heroine is Emma Howick, anthropologist....

Published to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, these are powerful wartime stories written by the finest women writers of that generation. This collection of wartime stories includes some of the finest writers of a generation....

Formidable Miss Doggett fills her life by giving tea parties for young academics and acting as watchdog for the morals of North Oxford. Anthea, her great-niece, is in love with a dashing undergraduate with political ambitions. Of this, Miss Doggett thoroughly approves....

Mildred Lathbury is one of those excellent women who are often taken for granted. She is a godsend, \"capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather\"....

Mildred Lathbury is one of those excellent women who are often taken for granted. She is a godsend, \"capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather\"....

Catherine Oliphant is a writer and lives with handsome anthropologist Tom Mallow. Their relationship runs into trouble when he begins a romance with student Deirdre Swann, so Catherine turns her attention to the reclusive anthropologist Alaric Lydgate, who has a fondness for wearing African masks....

Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year....

If Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates seem an unlikely pair to be walking together at an Oxford reunion, neither of them is aware of it. They couldn\"t be more different: Jane is a rather incompetent vicar\"s wife, who always looks as if she is about to feed the chickens, while Prudence, a pristine hothouse flower, has the most unsuitable affairs....

When Barbara Pym died in 1980, she left a considerable amount of unpublished material. This volume contains an early novel, Civil to Strangers, three novellas and an autobiographical essay, \"Finding a Voice\", Pym\"s only written comment on her writing career....

In a provincial university town, Caro Grimstone, a dissatisfied faculty wife, becomes the unwilling accomplice to her husband Alan\"s ambitions....

Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good-looking and fairly young - but very bored. Her sober husband Rodney, who works at the Ministry, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like to think she has changed rather less....

Dulcie Mainwaring is always helping others, but never looks out for herself - especially in the realm of love. Her friend Viola is besotted by the alluring Dr Aylwin Forbes, so surely it isn\"t prying if Dulcie helps things along? Aylwin, however, is smitten with Dulcie\"s pretty, young niece....

With an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies\" Detective Agency series. One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning. In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem - loneliness....

Barbara Pym is a master at capturing the subtle mayhem that takes place in the apparent quiet of the English countryside. Fifty-something sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a comfortable, settled existence....