Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

A Virago Modern Classic

By: Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bailey (Introduction by)

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Paperback | 6 April 2006 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
206 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
1.4 x 12.9 x 20

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Named by the Guardian as one of 'the 100 best novels,' and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont is a humorous and compassionate look at friendship between an old woman and a young man from a 'magnificent...writer, the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike' (David Baddiel, Independent)

On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper.

Then one day Mrs Palfrey strikes up an unlikely friendship with an impoverished young writer, Ludo, who sees her as inspiration for his novel.

'Elizabeth Taylor's exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp and witty portrait of genteel postwar English life facing the changes taking shape in the 60s . . . Much of the reader's joy lies in the exquisite subtlety in Taylor's depiction of all the relationships, the sharp brevity of her wit, and the apparently effortless way the plot unfolds' -Robert McCrum 'the 100 best novels', Guardian

Industry Reviews

'A wonderful novelist' -
Jilly Cooper

'How skilfully and with what peculiar exhilaration she negotiated the minefield of the human heart' -
Jonathan Keates

'The unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction' -
Rebecca Abrams, New Statesman

'A funny and honest examination of the casual cruelty we can sometimes inflict upon each other' -
Daily Mail

'I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time. Theirs will be an unexpected pleasure, and they will - if they read her as she wanted to be read - learn much that will surprise them' -
Paul Bailey

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