Mary Wesley Knihy

Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt's house for their annual ritual of a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with the heady exhilarations and freedoms of lost innocence, as well as the fears of the coming war.The Camomile Lawn moves from Cornwall to London and back again, over the years, telling the stories of the cousins, their family and their friends, united by shared losses and lovers, by family ties and the absurd conditions imposed by war as their paths cross and recross over the years. Mary Wesley presents an extraordinarily vivid and lively picture of wartime London: the rationing, imaginatively circumvented; the fallen houses; the parties, the new-found comforts of sex, the desperate humour of survival - all of it evoked with warmth, clarity and stunning wit. And through it all, the cousins and their friends try to hold on to the part of themselves that laughed and played dangerous games on that camomile lawn.

Mary Wesley, through images and text, looks back over her life in England's wild and mysterious south-west peninsula. The book captures her memories from her early visits to Polzeath in Cornwall in 1914 to the present day living and working in Totnes.

After a mysterious catastrophe befalls much of the earth, Muriel, her son Paul, and his friend Henry must learn how to survive in this new, barren, and disturbingly empty world. By the author of A Dubious Legacy.

She was a thin, lonely child with huge eyes and an extensive vocabulary of French foul language. Amongst the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in Dinard in 1926--leading their privileged lives of secure routine pleasures--Flora was a ten-year-old misfit. Ignored by her self-absorbed parents, unloved, and pitied by the pleasant, stylish people in Brittany that summer, Flora was--peripherally--included in their gracious circles. And there, meeting kindly civilised people for the first time, she fell in love--with Cosmo--with Hubert--with Feix. It took forty years for the love affairs to be explored, consummated and finally resolved. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Early in 1941, having just seen off at Euston Station the two young men whom she has loved for the best part of her seventeen years, Juno Marlowe is hurrying down a London street with her ill-fitting shoes in her hands.  Airplanes thunder overhead; a battery of guns opens up.  When a stick of bombs falls she cowers, then takes to her heels in flight.  She is rescued from this nightmare by a gaunt stranger, frail and older than his years, and, guiding her up his front stairs, he offers her the protection of his house.Given this respite from the bleakness of having no home and no family to turn to, Juno first encounters tragedy, then a series of events which take her to a house in the West Country and the blossoming of an English spring into which war only occasionally intrudes.  Here she may find peace; here she will no longer be part of the furniture.  Part of the Furniture completes the triptych of wartime novels begun with The Camomile Lawn and A Sensible Life.

After her husband's funeral, Rose looks back on a life of dual constancy, passion, humour and the ambiguities of love - and chooses her future. A witty and charming love story among the British middle classes with surprising twists.

This lively and entertaining romp through England and Africa. The Vacillations of Poppy Carew opens with two key events: the departure of Poppy’s thoroughly detestable lover, Edmund, for a richer woman, and the death of her father who, to the irritation of the nursing staff, dies in the midst of raucous laughter. Poppy follows her father’s dying wish and organizes a “fun” funeral complete with black-plumed horses and a suspicious number of glamorous women. Present at the funeral are three men who are determined to become her suitors. However, the treacherous Edmund shows up as well and, discovering that Poppy is now heiress to a fortune, abandons his new love interest and whisks Poppy off to Africa, where she embarks on a series of chaotic adventures. Will she escape Edmund’s clutches? If so, with whom of her three suitors will she escape?

Hebe has harnessed her two great talents - cooking and making love - to make a living for herself, but when the separate strands of her life become intangled the even tenor of her days is threatened, and her world changes forever.

A traveller on a train smells the burn of brakes on the rails as the train stops suddenly in the countryside. Looking out the window, he sees a white-faced woman leap from the train in aid of a stranded sheep. The image lodges in his mind, a familiar despair he knows.

When James and Matthew spent the weekend with Henry Tillotson in 1954, they took an instant liking to the country house that Henry had inherited from his father. His wife was a bit odd though - she never seemed to get out of bed. Gossip suggested that Henry had inherited her as well.

Matilda Poliport, recently widowed, has decided to end it all. It All. But her meticulously planned bid for graceful oblivion is foiled, and when she later foils the suicide attempt of another lost soul - Hugh Warner, on the run from the police - life begins again for both.

Beautiful, independent and brazenly manipulative, 40-ish Laura Thornby plays muse to 23-year-old aspiring novelist Claud Bannister in "Wesley's mordantly humorous take on upper-middle-class British life,"

In 1944 Henry Tillotson brings his new wife, Mararet, home to his farmhouse in the English countryside. Margaret is a strange, unpleasant woman, determined, it seems, to make Henry's life miserable. 'Poor Henry!' say his friends, as they visit at weekends and holidays. 'What an awful life he has!' But Henry is not at all the sad and disappointed man we might expect him to be. He manages to enjoy life, and indeed, has quite a lot of fun, one way and another ... Mary Wesley's story takes a sharp but light-hearted look at love, sex, and marriage - and the things people will do to get what they want

Alles scheint außer Kontrolle zu geraten: Mitten im Juli fällt grüner und rosa Schnee, gewaltige Erdbeben erschüttern Afrika, die Pest und andere Seuchen breiten sich sprunghaft in Amerika aus, riesige Überschwemmungen in Asien... und eine mysteriöse Katastrophe, der Muriel Wake, ihr 14-jähriger Sohn Paul und dessen Schulfreund Henry durch Zufall (?) entgehen, trifft Devonshire im Südwesten Englands. Die drei finden sich in einer totenstillen Welt vor: Die Menschen sind verschwunden, nur ihre Habseligkeiten und ihre - Haare blieben zurück. Allmählich finden sie auch andere Überlebende, merken, dass die Katastrophe größere Ausmaße haben muss, von denen sie aber nichts erfahren, weil alles stillsteht: kein Radio, kein TV, kein Telefon...

Als Henry Tillotson die schöne Margaret heiratet, ahnt er nicht, daß sie ihr Eheleben dazu nutzen wird, ihn finanziell zu schröpfen, vor seinen Freunden zu blamieren und zu verleumden. Doch mit Hilfe seiner Freunde macht er das Beste aus seinem Los.

Ein schwarzer Panamahut mit Zauberkräften beschert Lisas nicht gerade betuchter Familie ein halb verfallenes Haus im Süden Englands. Nach ihrem Einzug geschehen geheimnisvolle Dinge....

Henry, Erbe eines heruntergewirtschafteten englischen Landgutes, bringt 1944 seine schöne junge Frau heim. Aus ungeklärten Gründen bleibt diese fortan im Bett und tyrannisiert ihre Umgebung.