Jane Gardam

A moving, Booker-shortlisted story of a girl's coming of age

* A new collection that is a masterclass in the art of the short story from Jane Gardam, bestselling author of OLD FILTH

* A brilliant, witty and moving novel about keeping the faith in extreme adversity

In prose vibrant and witty, The Queen of the Tambourine is a darkly comic novel about a smart, sensitive, and wildly imaginative woman who loses and then regains control over her life. Once the proverbial good woman behind a highly successful husband, Eliza Peabody now finds herself abandoned and isolated in her prosperous London neighborhood. She will have to reach new depths before discovering a path back to health and serenity.Winner of the Whitbread Award for Fiction, this is a moving story of a woman's confrontation with the often hard realities of the golden years by the beloved author of Old Filth.

First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. "Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters" (The New York Times Book Review). Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written an unforgettable novel reminiscent of Evan S. Connell's books Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, and Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep. Retracing much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history, Old Filth is the first installment of an immersive and atmospheric trilogy that, taken together, tells the moving story of a long, complicated marriage. "Old Filth is an extraordinary novel--the structure, the characters, the sweep of time."--Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House "I don't know why Gardam isn't universally celebrated and beloved. Her prose is dazzling, and she writes with a kind of subdued but wicked humor that takes a moment to clamp down on you."--Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "I think Jane Gardam is a genius and should be far more widely read. She has actually made me gasp, slap a book shut and say, 'She can't do that , ' open it up and realize that she can, she has, and it works."--Denise Mina, author of Conviction SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE A BEST BOOK OF THE YEARThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Washington PostThe San Francisco ChronicleNew York MagazineThe Globe & MailSlate"Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and--a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture--adult."--The Washington Post "Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting."--The Seattle Times "A masterpiece of storytelling."--The Dallas Morning News " Jane Gardam is] the best contemporary British writer you probably haven't heard of."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR

With her customary accuracy, Jane Gardam reveals the extraordinariness of ordinary people as she deals with the pangs of love- fulfilled or hopeless, sexual or spiritual, tortured or hilarious- in these eleven stories.Paraded here are ladies with a 'thing' about vicars, strange events happening in ornate downstairs lavatories (and in ornate upstairs ones), and the English abroad, desperate and dotty. The glum and impossible Edna haunts the supermarket- and dispenses an unlikely kiss of life. The younger sister of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid declares her sibling 'very silly' and turns her story on its tail, an old maid forms a curious liason with a tramp, and small moments of temptation fill hotel rooms as histories glance briefly off each other.

A rather mysterious old clergyman is dead, and his most adoring child, sixteen-year-old Athene is desolate. A statuesque beauty, greatly admired, she is also lonely, untouchable and living a secret life of fairly dangerous fantasy.Athene's mother, at once highly organised and monumentally vague, dispatches her children to spend the holidays with assorted friends and relatives. For Athene, victim of plans gone awry, that golden summer after the funeral becomes deliciously puzzling fodder for her fantasy. Stuck in a seaside hotel with an inarticulate and beautiful boy, marooned in a seaside cottage with a painter, and finally alone in an empty school with a young master, she finds that men are not all as saintly as her father- and that she is far from saintly herself...

A wonderful bittersweet story about a misguided do-gooder.

A loosely connected sequence of stories, offering vignettes of human foibles from the holiday island of Jamaica. Mrs Filling sees something nasty in the midday sun; an English lawyer dallies while his wife goes mad in England; sexuality flares and everywhere farce and racial tension lurk.

This collection brings together past and present, probing many and varied lives. The title story examines Jane Austen's love life, while others introduce a trio of Kensington widows, mean-spirited and middle-aged; a stranger, awaited with dread; and the mercurial changes in young love.

*A classic novel of English adolescence