Love Among the Ruins

De: Angela Thirkell

Narrado por: Catrin Walker-Booth

It's the summer of 1947, and peacetime has brought new challenges to Barsetshire. Beliers Priory, once a military hospital during the War, has now become a flourishing preparatory school for boys run by Leslie and Philip Winter.

When Charles Belton is hired as the new school master, six young people are thrown together in a web of flirtations and misunderstandings: Charles and his elder brother, Naval Captain Freddy Belton; Susan Dean, now Red Cross Depot Librarian, and her glamorous sister Jessica, an actress in thrall to the theatre; pragmatic Lucy Marling and her brother Oliver. And with the old social order in ruins, the scene is set for a delicious summer of comic - and romantic - possibilities.

Love Among the Ruins is a delightful, clever and wryly poignant classic, and the 17th novel in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series.

©1948 Angela Thirkell (P)2024 Hachette Audio UK

Barsetshire after WWII

I very much enjoy Angela Thirkell's series of novels set in the English county of Barsetshire, a fictional place she borrowed from Anthony Trollope. Some of her characters are descended from some of his characters. My personal preference is for the books set prior to or during WWII. After the war they tend to get more complex as she brings back many characters from earlier books as well as introducing a number of new ones. And her books are creations of a certain time and place, and some of the attitudes expressed by characters and even by the narrative voice at times can be a bit uncomfortable.

However, I enjoyed the book/audiobook as a whole, and also treasure it and the other books in the series as not only enjoyable stories but also pieces of social history. A historical novel set in the late 1940's would have the details of how people really felt, thought and spoke smoothed out, and leave the reader/listener in a sanitized world more like today without cell phones. I want to read and listen to the real thing, books written more or less at the time in which they were set rather than what today's autors/editors want us to THINK that time was like.

I would like to see more Thirkell audiobooks in the future, so my collection can grow. Thirkell's use of language and dry wit, her ability to create characters we can love or love to hate is wonderful in spite of her lack of perfection.

Life in England after WWIii

Character development. Insight I into England immediately after World War Two including the effects of peace on lifestyle.