RETRO READS
NOT AT HOME by Doris Langley Moore (Dean Street Press £10.99, 298 pp)
NOT AT HOME
by Doris Langley Moore (Dean Street Press £10.99, 298 pp)
It’s 1945, London, and beguiling Tonia, whose husband works abroad, rents grand rooms at the elegant home of Elinor, 50, a genteel spinster academic.
‘You’ll find me madly careful,’ burbles Tonia, in raptures over the gorgeous house, yet soon to become the tenant from hell. Her rowdy female friends staying overnight, constant babble of music, banging doors, dancing and shouting slowly torment Elinor who is too inhibited to complain. When Tonia’s hubby arrives, a party results in drunks asleep on the sofas, cigarette burns and sandwiches trodden into the Aubusson carpet.
This depiction of domestic nightmare and Elinor’s ingenious solution is highly entertaining.
THE STREET
by Ann Petry (Virago £9.99, 416 pp)
Spotlighting racial injustice, this was the first novel (1946) by a black woman to exceed a million sales. Afro-American Lutie works as a live-in maid to a rich, white family, sending home her wages to her unemployed husband. She resents cleaning another woman’s house and minding another woman’s child when her own son needs her. Inevitably, her marriage falls apart.
Returning to New York’s black ghetto she is a lonely, vulnerable single mum renting a squalid attic, harassed by male predators, surrounded by violence, vice and crime.
Desperate to find decent work and create a safe home for her son, she is trapped by poverty, despair and a creepy male abuser until her rage explodes into a brilliantly devastating ending.
VITTORIA COTTAGE
by D.E. Stevenson (Dean Street Press £10.99, 218 pp)
Fancy a book that’s the literary equivalent of eating a box of chocolates in front of a log fire? Events unfold at an idyllic English village teeming with ‘Oo-arr’ yokels, salt-of-the-earth types, nicely spoken youngsters and cosy cottages where tea is brewed and kettles always sing on the hob.
The action and tittle-tattle hot up when tower-of-strength Caroline, widow and mother of three teenagers, falls for a charming, mysterious stranger.
Chickens, blackberry-picking, oak beams and inglenooks galore — they all enrich this non-challenging, rose-tinted read.
To buy any book reviewed here, visit mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155