It's free book extract time again!
'PG Wodehouse meets Barbara Pym' - glorious new novel alert, ding ding 🔔
One of the great mysteries of life is why Lissa Evans isn’t huge. She does very well, but she ought to bestride the bestseller chart like a colossus. She is such a brilliant writer.
She’s extremely funny - not glib-funny or snigger-funny but deeply, properly, cleverly funny. Her books are full of heart, soul and intelligence, and are therefore intensely satisfying. They’re the sorts of novels you start eking out halfway through because you don’t want them to end.
She makes you hoot with laughter - the joke pops back into your head two days later and sets you off again, so that you’re laughing alone by the frozen peas - and then makes you feel broken-hearted, all in the space of a few pages. The novels are beautifully constructed, with perfectly-realised, minutely-detailed worlds to lose yourself in. And she is fantastic at endings, so that you close the books feeling fully contented (so many novels end oddly, like being served coffee halfway through the main course). If you haven’t read her before, head for Crooked Heart, Old Baggage and V for Victory, and read them in that order.
But read this one first. Small Bomb at Dimperley, hot off the press - it was published yesterday - is in my view her best book thus far. I’ve been dying to tell you about it for months. It is the perfect novel to curl up with as the nights draw in, and it comes festooned with praise: Daisy Goodwin accurately calls it ‘Wodehouse meets Barbara Pym… funny, poignant, perfect,’ Graham Norton says it is ‘incredibly assured and affecting,’ Clare Chambers says it is ‘generous, touching and romantic’. I’m on the back flap correctly asserting that this novel is Lissa at the absolute peak of her powers.
It’s 1945. Dimperley is a historic English stately home, inherited by Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett, aged 23 and freshly back from the war. His older brother has died, so now the whole thing’s on him - the giant, crumbling pile, the moth-eaten taxidermy collection, and the ancient relatives who live at Dimperley and haven’t grasped that its glory days are over.
In the mix is Zena Baxter, a heroine I guarantee you’ll remember 30 years from now, who has been evacuated to Dimperley with her small daughter. She is not from this dusty, aristocratic world. She is the Small Bomb of the title.
This novel is SO GOOD. And because I love you and am so grateful for you being a subscriber, here’s Chapter Four of the book for you to read - our first introduction to Zena Baxter - absolutely free.
I’m slightly taken aback that the first week of September is already almost over (cue the evergreen Roz Chast cartoon). As ever, if you enjoyed this post then do very very kindly give it a ❤️, which makes it more visible to non-subscribers. THANK YOU and I’ll be back on Sunday with a food post. Have a lovely rest of the week!
Need to get my reading mojo back. Think you might have just found it for me. Bought! Thank you so much! 💚
OOH, how lovely. I shall make a gallon of tea and read this in the garden this afternoon.
Thank you so much India