The Reverend Henry Harding was a handsome & prepossessing man. Unfortunately fate had seen fit to bless him with a family of extremely plain & unprepossessing children. Caroline was the least plain, according to Lady Lennox, but the entire Lennox family also admitted that Caroline was the least significant person in Dorset.
Caroline, already twenty-six & bullied by her sister, was nervous in company & had no prospects at all. She had one golden memory, of an admirer when she was eighteen, but John Gates, nephew to the Lennox family, had gone to India & forgotten her. Or so she thought.
When Caroline was summoned by Lady Lennox to be told that Johnny Gates had sent a proposal of marriage, Caroline first declined. But within a few weeks tragedy had overtaken her. The little security & contentment she had known vanished from her life & left her no option but to accept Lady Lennox's offer.
In the October of 1776, Caroline Harding set sail for India, to a new life & a man she had not seen for eight years.


...

Early in 1941, having just seen off at Euston Station the two young men whom she has loved for the best part of her seventeen years, Juno Marlowe is hurrying down a London street with her ill-fitting shoes in her hands. Aeroplanes thunder overhead; a battery of guns opens up. When a stick of bombs falls she cowers, then takes to her heels in flight. She is rescued from this nightmare by a gaunt stranger, frail & older than his years; guiding her up his front steps, he offers her the protection of his house.

Given this respite from the bleakness of an existence where she has no home & family to turn to, Juno encounters first tragedy, then a series of events that take her to a house in the West Country & the blossoming of an English Spring into which war only occasionally intrudes. Here she may find peace, here she will no longer just be part of the furniture.

Mary Wesley



...

A refreshing antidote to the saccharine charms of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence & Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, this is the quirky & hilarious memoir of a criminal lawyer who gives up his New York practise to spend a year in the Etruscan town of Sutri, near Rome, where he moves
- reluctantly
- with his artist wife & baby. Himself something of an eccentric from a bizarre Nebraskan family, he has spent his adult life living in hotels; & in Sutri, he heads straight for the caf- in the main square. From there he observes the baroque events of small-town life, conjures up a cast of Italian eccentrics (including Pasquale & his hypersensitive organ of smell), & relishes the weirdness & the wonder of Sutri's history, folklore, architecture & above all its food
- particularly the notorious 'fagioli regina' (beans in a tomato & pig skin sauce) & the annual Bean Festival. Part of the delight of reading this memoir is that it not only evokes the sights & smells of an ancient & little-known town in Southern Italy, & brings its people to extraordinary life, but it also reveals the irresistible foibles & philosophy of a talented & unusual mind. Funny, philosophical & surprisingly moving, this is the story of how a rootless American finds home in the most unexpected places & how Pasquale & his compatriots put life into perspective in the strangest way.


...