Stella Gibbons of Gibbons's "most enjoyable and vicious" satirical portraits. In her introduction to the book's 2011 reprint, Lynne Truss describes it as "a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue" that deserved more commercial success than it received. The public's expectations were still prejudiced by "Cold Comfort Farm", which by 1949 had sold 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback. Anticipating that a sequel would be popular, that year Gibbons produced "Conference at Cold Comfort Farm", her shortest novel, in which the farm has become a conference centre and tourist attraction. There is much
The Narrows (Petry novel) The Narrows (Petry novel) The Narrows is a 1953 novel by African-American writer Ann Petry. “The Narrows” is the name of the African-American section of the fictional town of Monmouth, Connecticut, in which most of the novel's action takes place. Though less famous than Petry's earlier novel, "The Street", "The Narrows" is her longest novel and, critic Hilary Holladay argues, her most complex: “"The Narrows" represents the full flowering of Petry’s preoccupation with human relationships.” The novel is written in the third person, narrated from the perspective of several different characters, often in flashback episodes. The epigraph in "The Narrows"