I started out enjoying the prose in this book, but language alone can't carry a novel. It's hard to believe this is the same authoress who wrote such action-packed children's stories. Sharp didn't seem to know where she was going in this book. The title character is interesting at first, and then...
The Nutmeg Tree charts the fortunes of Julia, a middle aged former actress who retains her gleeful love of life and all it has to offer. Her enthusiasm and warmth has got her into trouble before in her youth, not least when she finds herself swiftly become pregnant, married and widowed in the sp...
A middle-aged couple in love must end their relationship, as Harry is forced by the failure of his business to leave his mistress to marry his business partner's daughter. King Hal and his Spanish Rose, as they see each other and, through each other's eyes, themselves, thereafter pine miserably ...
Antoinette is an "innocent", a retarded child, left with an older woman in a small English town after her parents are forced back to New York at the beginning of World War II. She does not speak but slowly says a very few words as she develops a closeness with her foster mother. After the war ...
Life in London for Lesley was everything that a young woman could desire: elegant clothes, a full engagement book, a wide circle of friends. Yet, on the spur of the moment, Lesley suddenly adopts a four-year-old child."If I'd known what I was taking on I shouldn't have done it. . . ." Little did ...
The flat occupied by himself and his mother was on the fourth floor; tradespeople in a hurry frequently left parcels below—also Madame Leclerc the concierge seldom troubled to carry up a letter unless she suspected it to contain bad news. The pause at the lodge was part of Eric’s routine, his wor...
They were all upstairs in the great linen-closet. There was an enormous quantity of linen at the farm, each aunt having her separate store, marked with her own maiden initials; about once a year, when they needed new pudding-cloths, it was all taken out, and gone through, and regraded from unused...
observed the milkman. “How was the grub this trip?” With some surprise, Louisa realized that at Glenarvon she’d hardly noticed the food at all. Only one meal stayed in her memory: a picnic Sunday lunch … “I suppose I ate,” said Louisa. “But nothing tasty?” sympathized the milkman. “Just plain fam...