Search Results

“... nor offshoots, but playful and original tributes to the work that’s set them off. With Jane Gardam’s latest novel the background book, and enriching ingredient, is Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Gardam is not new to the practice. The Summer after the Funeral (1973) has a heroine (aged 16 – it’s ostensibly a ...”

“... have reached and touched it, now it’s gone. Implicitly, change is these writers’ subject. Jane Gardam has been the recorder of aspects of Englishness for a long time: more than 20 novels over the past 40 years. Her latest, The Man in the Wooden Hat, addresses itself to the presumptions and tensions of postwar late Empire with a present ...”

“... charnel houses.’ Shorter is Time: ‘Bech surprises.’ The short story would seem to be Jane Gardam’s criticism of life. Her view of things is sharp, yielding nothing more expressive than tolerant amusement at some of life’s more elegant little ironies. In what I take to be the best piece in The Pangs of Love, a story called ‘The Easter ...”

“... feel so ghastly.’ Charles and Philip are touched in more lightly, but they are real enough. Like Jane Austen, Alice Thomas Ellis can describe women’s lives so well because she understands men perfectly. More prominent in the story is Sylvie’s daughter, who is notionally reading Greats but actually trying to win a prize for romantic fiction. Evvie has ...”