Jane Gardam Books In Order

Old Filth

‘Jane Gardam’s beautiful, vivid and defiantly funny novel is a must.’The Times ‘Gardam’s superb new novel is surely her masterpiece…
one of the most moving fictions I have read in years…
This is the rare novel that drives its readers forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of it style.’The Guardian ‘The Whitbread winner scores again with a compelling novel based, in part, on the early life of Rudyard Kipling.’Time Out Sir Edward Feathers has progressed from struggling young barrister to wealthy expatriate lawyer to distinguished retired judge, living out his last days in comfortable seclusion in Dorset. The engrossing and moving account of his life, from birth in colonial Malaya, to Wales, where he is sent as a ‘Raj orphan,’ to Oxford, his career and marriage, parallels much of the 20th century’s torrid and twisted history. Old Filth was nominated for the 2005 Orange Prize. Jane Gardam lives with her husband and three children in England. She has won Katherine Mansfield Award, the PEN Macmillan Silver Pen Award, the Whitbread Novel Award twice, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She was recently awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of a distinguished literary career.

The Man in the Wooden Hat

The New York Times called Sir Edward Feathers one of the most memorable characters in modern literature. A lyrical novel that recalls his fully lived life, Old Filth has been acclaimed as Jane Gardam’s masterpiece, a book where life and art merge. And now that beautiful, haunting novel has been joined by a companion that also bursts with humor and wisdom: The Man in the Wooden Hat.

Old Filth was Eddie’s story. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.

They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.

As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the 50 year union of two remarkable people, the novel is a triumph. The Man in the Wooden Hat is fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power. It will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and so thoroughly satisfying.

A Long Way from Verona

‘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.

The Summer After the Funeral

Following her father’s death, a sixteen year old English girl spends an unsettling summer convinced that she has lived before as Emily Bronte.

Black Faces, White Faces

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.

God on the Rocks

During one glorious summer between the wars, the realities of life and the sexual ritual dance of the adult world creep into the life of young Margaret Marsh. Her father, preaching the doctrine of the unsavoury Primal Saints; her mother, bitterly nostalgic for what might have been; Charles and Binkie, anchored in the past and a game of words; dying Mrs Frayling and Lydia the maid, given to the vulgar enjoyment of life; all contribute to Margaret’s shattering moment of truth. And when the storm breaks, it is not only God who is on the rocks as the summer hurtles towards drama, tragedy, and a touch of farce.

The Sidmouth Letters

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 mean spirited and middle aged Kensington widows, a dreaded stranger, and the mercurial changes in young love.

Through the Doll’s House Door

Two girls lose interest in playing with their doll house after moving from London to Wales but the dolls in the house amuse themselves by telling stories about their exciting pasts.

The Queen of the Tambourine

With prose that is vibrant witty and off the wall, The Queen of the Tambourine traces the emotional breakdown and eventual restoration of Eliza Peabody, a smart and wildly imaginative woman who has become unbearably isolated in her prosperous home in present day South London. The letters Eliza writes to her neighbor, a woman whom she hardly knows, reveal the story of her self propelled descent into madness. Eliza must reach the very bottom of her inner downward spiral before she can once again find health and serenity. The story of a woman’s confrontation with the ideas and realities of sanity, The Queen of Tambourine will delight readers who enjoy the works of Anita Brookner, Sybille Bedford, Muriel Spark, and Sylvia Plath.

Faith Fox

Faith Fox is a sparkling novel of comedy and conversation, birth and death, and the differences between England’s well born and plain people from a two time winner of the Whitbread Prize and Booker Prize finalist. This comedy of manners set in early 90s Britain centers around newborn Faith Fox, the daughter of the sweet, healthy, and hearty pearl of her Surrey village, Holly Fox, who inexplicably dies in childbirth. Faith s beanpole father can t and won t look after her. Holly s mother a matron from Surrey s gin and tonic belt who is ostensibly full of good nature, good sense, and sociability refuses to acknowledge the baby whose birth killed the daughter she loved. And so an extraordinary group of family, friends, and strangers converge to make sure that Faith Fox ends up raised well in the right hands. The concerned parties include an ascetic priest of an uncle in Northern England who runs a commune with his unfaithful ex hippie wife and her precocious, lonely son; the Tibetan refugees staying there; and the splendidly bickering and ancient paternal grandparents. As Faith s future unravels amidst the shifting scenes of high society and low, the old and the young, Jane Gardam explores the English heart in all its eccentric variety.

The Green Man

This story offers a modern twist on the myth of The Green Man the ancient fertility image of legend, church carvings and pub signs.

The Flight of the Maidens

It is the summer of 1946, a time of clothing coupons and food rations, of postwar deprivations and social readjustment. In this precarious new era, three young women prepare themselves to head off to university and explore the world beyond Yorkshire, England. The bookish Hetty Fallowes struggles to become independent of her overbearing mother, Una Vane embarks on a bicycle trip around the countryside with a young man from the wrong side of the tracks, and Liselotte Klein, a Jewish refugee taken in by a Quaker family, heads to London in search of her only relatives to survive the Na*zis.

As the three struggle to find meaning and love in a new world, they realize that they still have much to learn, and that their friendship is perhaps the only constant in an ever changing world.

‘Gardam can see deep into the hearts of both parents and children as the balance of power tips…
her sly style is perfect for this muted but primal struggle.’ The New York Times Book Review

‘This novel about a friendship among three 17 year old girls powerfully evokes the people and the period at the end of WWII…
At turns hugely funny and deeply moving.’ The Atlantic Monthly

Showing the Flag

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.

The People on Privilege Hill and Other Stories

A new collection of stories from a writer at the height of her powers a celebrated stylist admired for her caustic humor, freewheeling imagination, love of humanity and wicked powers of observation. This is a delightful grouping of stories, witty and wise, that includes the return of Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself.

Iron Coast

This collection of photographs is accompanied by Jane Gardam’s text, and concentrates mainly on a wild and beautiful part of Yorkshire known as the Iron Coast. It is a celebration of a varied and extraordinary landscape, its history and people.