Paperback, 256 pages
English language
Published Oct. 24, 2007 by Moyer Bell.
This wry comedy of manners—Barbara Pym's seventh novel and the last one she wrote before a fifteen-year silence when she gave up writing novels altogether, a hiatus broken only in 1977—is set in the Parish of St. Basil's Church in a slightly unfashionable quarter in London. The vicar, Mark Ainger, his wife Sophia, her sister Penelope, a new arrival to the parish named Rupert Stonebird, and a gentlewoman named Ianthe Broome fret over improbable attachments and embark on a holiday to Rome that will prove decisive to them all
Third-tier Pym, tbh, but even so a good read. (No Fond Return of Love is the best; Quartet in Autumn possibly second best but so much more grim)
