When Endeavour Press asked me if I would like to be sent an ebook of People at Play by Elizabeth Berridge I had to google her as I had never heard of her before. Anyway, I decided to accept the book offer as going by her Guardian obituary it seemed like she was a good writer.

To begin with I was a bit unsure because the main character Stani seemed to dislike redheads, that’s not something that I’m going to find reasonable, but it turned out that he was a bit of a weird chap.

The setting is mainly London in the 1960s when World War 2 still seemed quite recent and there were people living there who had been wartime refugees of various nationalities and still didn’t seem to be fitting in, especially amongst themselves.

Stani has a room in the house that he and his mother had lived in when they first got to Britain and he’s now a sort of caretaker, letting out the other rooms to various types. The house is owned by Mrs Bannister and she has decamped to a large old house not too far away in the suburbs near Richmond, it feels like the country to her. Just after the war her husband had decided that he wanted his freedom and he gave her the large house on condition that she looked after his two rather dotty elderly cousins.

Mrs Bannister realises that it is his way of dumping all his responsibilities on her, but she decides to take it all on and change the house into a home for the elderly. There are a lot of quirky characters, young and old, and nothing is quite as it seems to be.

I enjoyed this book and will look out for more of Elizabeth Berridge’s books. My thanks go to Endeavour Press for sending me this ebook.