The Country Life (novel) The Country Life (novel) The Country Life is a comedic novel by Rachel Cusk, first published in 1997, which draws on Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm" and Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre". It won a 1998 Somerset Maugham Award. The novel is a comedy that draws on both "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë. Stella Benson, the first-person narrator, abruptly abandons her life in London to take a position as carer to Martin, the wheelchair-bound teenage son of the wealthy and eccentric Madden family, in a farm near a small village in rural Sussex. The
Island (Huxley novel) Island (Huxley novel) Island is the final book by English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1962. It is the account of Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala. "Island" is Huxley's utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 dystopian novel "Brave New World". The ideas that would become "Island" can be seen in a foreword he wrote in 1946 to a new edition of "Brave New World": Englishman William Asquith "Will" Farnaby deliberately wrecks his boat on the Polynesian shores of the Kingdom of Pala, thus forcing his entry to this