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Jane Gardam

    July 11, 1928

    Jane Gardam is a celebrated British author whose works for both children and adults offer profound insights into the human condition. Her writing masterfully explores themes of growing up, loss, and the search for identity, often set against the backdrop of evocative English landscapes. Gardam's prose is remarkably sensitive and poetic, capturing complex emotions and the nuances of relationships with striking precision. She focuses on delving into the inner lives of her characters, examining how their experiences and environments shape them.

    The Sidmouth Letters
    Old Filth
    The Stories
    The Hollow Land
    The man in the wooden hat
    Showing The Flag
    • Showing The Flag

      • 176 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      The flag that is shown, literally and metaphorically, by these characters is always the Union Jack. Gardam's stories are acutely observed social commentaries on Englishness, its weaknesses and its illusions.

      Showing The Flag
    • The man in the wooden hat

      • 288 pages
      • 11 hours of reading
      4.2(116)Add rating

      Filth (Failed in London, try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. Reserved, immaculate and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese Internment Camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the Bar - the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son - and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his emotions ...How Elisabeth turns into Betty and whether she remains loyal to stolid Filth or is swept up by caddish Veneering, makes for a page-turning plot in a perfect novel which is full of surprises and revelations, as well as the humour and eccentricites for which Jane Gardam's writing is famous.

      The man in the wooden hat
    • The Hollow Land

      • 224 pages
      • 8 hours of reading
      4.1(496)Add rating

      A stunning novel, winner of the Whitbread Award, by the author of Old Filth and Last Friends.

      The Hollow Land
    • The Stories

      • 496 pages
      • 18 hours of reading
      3.9(45)Add rating

      Throughout her career, prize-winning novelist Jane Gardam has been writing glorious short stories, each one hallmarked with all the originality, poignancy, wry comedy and narrative brilliance of her longer fiction. Passion and longing, metamorphosis and enchantment are Gardam's themes, and like a magician she plucks them from the quietest of corners: from Wimbledon gardens and cold churches, from London buses and industrial backstreets. A mother watching her children on the beach dreams of a long-lost lover, an abandoned army wife sees a ghost at a moorland gate, a translator adrift in Geneva is haunted by the unspeakable manifestation of her own fears, and a colonial servant wreaks a delicious revenge on her monstrous masters. Gardam's cast is wide and wonderful, saints and mystics, trollops and curmudgeons, yearning mothers and lost children, beloved figures such as Old Filth and less familiar - but equally unforgettable - characters like Signor Settimo, the sad-eyed provincial photographer marooned in Shipley or Florrie Ironside, the ferocious matron he seduces. With a mischievous ear for dialogue, a glittering eye for detail and a capacious understanding of the vagaries of the human heart, Jane Gardam's stories will captivate, sadden and delight.

      The Stories
    • Old Filth

      • 272 pages
      • 10 hours of reading
      4.0(13261)Add rating

      Old Filth was a "child of the raj". His earliest memories are of his amah, a teenage Malay girl. But soon he is torn away from the only person who loves him and sent to be educated at "home", where he is boarded out with strangers. What is the terrible secret the children shared? What happened at the farmhouse in the Lake District?

      Old Filth
    • The Sidmouth Letters

      • 148 pages
      • 6 hours of reading
      3.9(107)Add rating

      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.

      The Sidmouth Letters
    • A Long Way from Verona

      • 192 pages
      • 7 hours of reading
      3.9(141)Add rating

      'I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal having had a violent experience at the age of nine' Jessica Vye's 'violent experience' colours her schooldays and her reaction to the world around her- a confining world of Order Marks, wartime restrictions, viyella dresses, nicely-restrained essays and dusty tea shops. For Jessica she has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer. With her inability to conform, her absolute compulsion to tell the truth and her dedication to accurately noting her experiences, she knows this anyway. But what she doesn't know is that the experiences that sustain and enrich her burgeoning talent will one day lead to a new- and entirely unexpected- reality.

      A Long Way from Verona
    • Bilgewater

      • 200 pages
      • 7 hours of reading
      3.9(917)Add rating

      Originally published in 1977, Jane Gardam's Bilgewater is an affectionate and complex rendering-in-miniature of the discomforts of growing up and first love seen through the eyes of inimitable Marigold Green, an awkward, eccentric, highly intelligent girl. The Evening Standard described Bilgewater as "one of the funniest, most entertaining, most unusual stories about young love."Motherless and 16, Marigold is the headmaster's daughter at a private backwater all-boys school. To make matters worse, Marigold pines for head boy Jack Rose, reckons with the beautiful and domineering Grace, and yanks herself headlong out of her interior world and into the seething cauldron of adolescence. With everything happening all at once, Marigold faces the greatest of teenage crucibles. A smart and painterly romp in the rich tradition of The Hollow Land and A Long Way From Verona, Gardam's elegant, evocative prose, possessed of sharp irony and easy surrealism makes Bilgewater a book for readers of all ages.

      Bilgewater
    • Crusoe's Daughter

      • 320 pages
      • 12 hours of reading
      3.8(131)Add rating

      Raised by her aunts after her father's death, Polly Flint spends the rest of her life in their home, emotionally shipwrecked like her hero, Robinson Crusoe.

      Crusoe's Daughter
    • God On The Rocks

      • 224 pages
      • 8 hours of reading
      3.8(190)Add rating

      *A moving, Booker shortlisted story of a girl's coming of age, beautifully rejacketed for this reissue

      God On The Rocks