Just a quick one tonight, I’m about 100 pages away from the end of this book but I want to say a big thank you to Joan Kyler who pointed me in the direction of Angela Thirkell. I’ve been having a thoroughly enjoyable time with The Brandons, a lot of the time I’ve been reading away, aware that there’s a big smile on my face but there have also been real laugh out loud moments. That doesn’t happen too often in my experience.
I want to get back to it now and I hope I’ll be able to say a bit more on the subject sometime tomorrow when I’ve finished.
I so want to read Angela Thirkell, but my library doesn’t have any of her novels!
Anbolyn,
I have the same problem here, my library only has a few of her books. I haven’t found any in the many second-hand bookshops which I’ve visited recently either. I suppose it’ll have to be Amazon or Abebooks but they can be quite expensive.
I am SO relieved that you like Angel Thirkell. I wish her books were more available, although, at least here in the U.S., some have been reprinted in paperback. I lucked out many years ago and was given a box of old, well-worn Thirkells from a librarian friend’s British mother. That was my first experience with them and I adored them. My sister watches for them at library sales and yard sales, so I’ve picked up a few more. There’s even a companion volume, Angela Thirkell’s World: A Complete Guide to the People and Places of Barsetshire by Barbara Burrell, similar to my Trollope companion. (This book was published by Moyer Bell and I would caution you not to buy any other Thirkell books reprinted by them. They are riddled with printing errors, so many that I almost threw out the Thirkell novel they reprinted before I finished it. The punctuation was so random and distracting! In fact, I just noticed that they misspelled Barsetshire as Baretshire on the title page! Careless, sloppy, I can’t stand it!)
Joan,
Her books are very difficult to get even here, I’ve been looking all over in bookshops and charity shops. It’s going to be a slow process I think but worth it!
It drives me nuts when books appear full of mistakes, I feel like offering them my services as a proof reader because they obviously need one. I’ve been looking on the internet and there is quite a lot about Angela Thirkell, she seems to have a lot of fans.