Marching with April
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
ISBN13: 9780648023326
Publisher: Wilkins Farago
Published: Jul 25 2017
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
It is the early 1950s. Lionel Spote, a young London publisher, has just discovered that he has inherited a Scottish estate. He is also a rather bemused devotee of the couch - the psychiatric one. Full to the brim with misgivings and uncertainty, he arrives in the far north to discover that his newly-acquired property 'marches' alongside that of a formidable woman, April Gunter-Sykes, who is staring-eyed and direct -- bluntly peculiar. It must be said that April's elusive daughter Laura seems far more appealing. He also meets Sir Duncan Fidge, the local MP, an ebullient storm of a man, who insists immediately on regaling him with his Great Plan to boost local productivity and employment. In the meantime, the estate has to be run, locals met, visits from Lionel's mother and his authors fielded and tolerated, an eccentric Pipe Major of the area's Cadets negotiated, not to mention the estate's bizarre housekeeper. An internecine war among the locals into which Lionel is swept up, centred around Sir Duncan's Big Idea, proves a stubborn and intractable problem. Lionel can only try to concentrate on Laura, and keep playing for all he's worth....Hugo Charteris' second novel is a magnificent farce of vying intentions set in a far northern Scottish county, with a motley of disparate characters fiercely protecting their own interests in a choppy sea of suspicion and bewilderment. The author's spare, intriguing and deadpan style embellishes this complex scenario with extraordinary flashes of insight and prodigious atmosphere. V. S. Pritchett said of this novel 'What a relief to laugh, to go in for spoofing and madness. I think this is one of the funniest novels I have read since the early Evelyn Waugh.'
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback
