Showing results by narrator "Penny Downie" in All Categories

Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.

In this wonderful, fraught, witty, real comedy about a middle-aged mother desperate to begin her post-children life, Stella is wondering why those grown-up children are all still in her house. Dreaming of retiring to a life in the countryside with her husband, instead she's dealing with four extra people in the house, rooms that urgently need de-junking, surprise pregnancy tests, difficult neighbours and a mother who really isn't helping anything. When she attempts to clear the useless clutter from the house, Stella realises it's her children who really need to go.

Pippa Gallagher is rushed in to a London hospital following a traffic accident. As she lies unconscious, she is aware of fragments. The day she met Steve Gallagher, her best friend and the man who would become the love of her life. The heartbreak she felt tonight as she got into her car, her eyes blurry from tears. Meanwhile Steve sits at her bedside, his eyes fixed on her pale, still face. He has no idea where his wife was going when she crashed. No clue as to why she became distracted behind the wheel. All he knows is that she is his world.

The dissolute Falstaff plans to seduce Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, two "Merry Wives of Windsor," there by gaining access to their husbands' wealth. The two women have the old rogue's measure, however, and Falstaff's plots lead only to his own humiliation. But the merry wives themselves fall prey to plotting as their plans to prevent Mistress Page's daughter Anne from marrying the young man she loves are frustrated in their turn.

A deliciously black satirical comedy about the dinner party from hell. The fastidious host, Paige, decides to throw a dinner party in honour of her husband, Lars, who is celebrating the success of his pop psychology book, Beyond Belief. She carefully plans a surprise menu that will mark the occasion and anxiously checks with the waiter she has employed to make sure that everything is perfectly prepared. Her lucky guests include a postfeminist vegetarian artist, a distinguished microbiologist, a TV journalist and an uninvited guest who ends up staying for dinner.