Guest review by Tania Pettet: THE WOMAN WHO WENT TO BED FOR A YEAR by Sue Townsend

 

"She has always been a master of voice — from Adrian Mole to The Queen and I, she writes with a kind of democratic empathy that sees everyone’s absurdities without cruelty."

Tania Pettet is a lifelong writer and observer of people. A background in nursing honed her gift for listening, while her writing explores the emotional, historical, and sometimes fantastical threads that connect lives. She writes poetry and prose inspired by memory, landscape, and the quiet stories that shape us.

Her debut novel, 11 Warten Way - a dual-timeline family saga set between wartime Italy and postwar Britain - is rooted in the true story of her grandparents. It explores how love, loss, and resilience define who we become.

Find her on Instagram: @tpwordhug

"Sometimes doing nothing is the only thing left to do.”

I grew up reading Adrian Mole; he and I were the same age. Townsend’s wit, warmth, and eye for human folly shaped how I saw the world, and her humour became a kind of companion. When I was fourteen, a car accident left me hospitalised for weeks, and books became my refuge. I read both Sue Townsend and J.R.R. Tolkien during that time — two very different worlds, yet each offering escape and perspective in their own way. Even then, I understood that Townsend’s laughter was never cruel — it was the laughter of someone who knew how pain and absurdity often live side by side.

At first glance, The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year is a deceptively simple story. A woman, overwhelmed by her family’s chaos and her own unacknowledged needs, opts out of it all. But Townsend’s genius lies in her ability to make this small domestic rebellion into a mirror of modern life. Eva’s bed becomes both a refuge and a battleground — a place where she reclaims the boundaries that motherhood, marriage, and habit have eroded.

What’s remarkable, especially in hindsight, is that this was Townsend’s final novel before her death in 2014. It reads like a valedictory work — still funny, still irreverent, but laced with melancholy. Beneath the wit lies a weariness that feels utterly authentic. Townsend, whose own health struggles were well known, writes about collapse not as weakness but as a form of truth-telling. When Eva says no, she is not refusing the world so much as demanding to exist within it differently.

Townsend’s prose is plain but piercing. She has always been a master of voice — from Adrian Mole to The Queen and I, she writes with a kind of democratic empathy that sees everyone’s absurdities without cruelty. Here, she turns that same eye on middle age, marriage, and mental overload. Even her caricatures — the pompous husband, the self-absorbed twins, the sanctimonious neighbours — are given enough shading to feel real.

One of my favourite characters is the window cleaner, Alexander. His gentle friendship with Eva becomes a quiet thread of humanity running through the story. Their conversations are often simple, sometimes awkward, but full of kindness. In Alexander, Townsend gives us an ordinary man who listens — truly listens — and through that act, offers Eva a kind of salvation. The stillness between them, often so understated it could be missed, becomes one of the most tender elements of the novel.

What lingers most, though, is the loneliness. Eva’s retreat draws attention from journalists and strangers, yet no one truly listens. In one sense, she becomes a minor celebrity for doing nothing; in another, she becomes a ghost in her own home. Townsend captures this paradox with tenderness — how modern life can make connection look busy while feeling empty.

There’s also a strong undercurrent of social critique. Townsend skewers the cult of productivity long before it became a buzzword. The novel asks what happens when a woman stops performing usefulness — when she steps out of her designated roles as mother, wife, and domestic anchor. The result is chaos, of course, but also clarity.

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year may masquerade as a domestic comedy, but it’s really an elegy — for women’s unseen labour, for middle-aged dreams deferred, and perhaps for the author herself. It’s a novel that begins with exhaustion and ends with a quiet kind of freedom.

Townsend’s voice remains singular: funny, humane, and unflinchingly observant. In Eva Beaver, she created not a heroine but an everywoman — someone who, by finally doing nothing, exposes everything that’s wrong with how we live.

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year is published by Michael Joseph (hardback) and Penguin (paperback).


Tania's 11 Warten Way is published by Terreni Press.

Guest review by Penny Dolan: SMALL BOMB AT DIMPERLEY by Lissa Evans

 

"A novel that cheers the heart. She writes with a wry sense of the comedy and tragedy of life ..."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

Lissa Evans’ Small Bomb at Dimperley is a novel that cheers the heart. She writes with a wry sense of the comedy and tragedy of life, and with a sympathy for her characters, no matter how flawed they prove themselves to be.

I had loved her previous three novels, set between 1918 & 1945: Old Baggage, Crooked Heart and V for Victory. Written with a joyful sense of humour and an awareness of the absurd in life, it is clear that Evans is familiar with these decades. Her earlier historical novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half, is about a young female copy-writer drafted into the Ministry of Information to add a woman’s perspective, and was later made into a film.

This recent novel, Small Bomb at Dimperley, begins in 1945 and deals with a society used to war, to hardship and to bravely making the best (or the most) of it. Now that the Peace has been announced, people are faced by a different world. Do they look to the past, or the future?

The main focus, the fictional Dimperley House, is an almost symbolic place from the past: an Elizabethan manor house in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Past generations had adorned the exterior with architectural whims and stacked the inside with curiosities, including an unseen ghost in a passageway.

Dimperley withstood bombing by passing aircraft, the roughness of army requisitioning and practical neglect as a war-time mother-and-baby home. The house has survived the war, but how, under a new Labour government, will it survive the peace?

Evans fills her novel – and Dimperley - with a rich collection of characters. The imperious Dowager Lady Irene Vere-Thisset has remained in occupation, along with her brother Uncle Alaric, a reclusive archivist and Cedric, her brain-damaged middle son. Also resident is Lady Barbara, the Dowager’s bullied daughter-in-law, along with a few devoted and less devoted servants, an old horse in the stables and the Dowager’s yappy dogs. Adding to the air of irritation are Kitty and Priss, Barbara’s rebellious teenage daughters, appalled by Dimperly’s deprivations after the plenty of childhood years spent in California.

And then it happens: a telegram brings news from the Far East. Handsome Felix, the adored son and heir, was missing but is now definitely dead. Consequently, Valentine, the youngest son, who has served the war years as a lowly army Corporal, is summoned home to become, unwillingly, lord of the manor. He has to face what Felix’s death has brought: a large and long-avoided inheritance tax demand and a storm of financial troubles.

How will the awkward, injured Valentine, known at school as ‘Thicko’ Thisset, manage to deal with all the debts and responsibilities and paperwork? How can he make the money needed to deal with the crisis? Who should he marry for money – and should he? And of course, there are the complications of Felix’s personal legacy.

Dimperley is, at heart, an almost traditionally romantic novel: by chance, dull Uncle Alaric has employed a capable young woman, Mrs Zena Baxter, to assist him in writing his history of the house. For Zena, and her determined two-year-old daughter Allison, Dimperley is a magical place. Zena, who grew up in grim circumstances, is determined to help the house and grounds survive. The novel is as much Zena’s story as it is of the Vere-Thisset family; gently reminding the reader that history belongs to us all. Eventually, when all the alarms and subterfuges are over, the expected ending comes as a satisfying pleasure.

The plot within Small Bomb at Dimperley stretches way beyond the manor gates, offering the reader a wide cast of characters: moneyed middle-classes, salesmen, shopkeepers and delivery drivers; women at home and church fetes, men in pubs and clubs, all the remains of the old class-bound society all struggling to seize a place in this new era.

I felt, as the story grew, that the author was gently honouring the many ordinary people who endured the war years on the home front: those who were ordered about, sometimes with ignorance, and forced to accept all manner of official regulations without being recognised in return. Now, in 1945, as the nation’s public life moves on, their quiet sufferings are ignored and invisible.

But not here, within Lissa Evan’s lovely book. I do recommend this novel: a perfect mix of nostalgia, poignancy, written with humour and for today’s audience. Although the ‘quiet’ might depend on how easily you laugh aloud.

Here is one of the many smaller moments, as Barbara takes the injured Valentine out in the car.

The whole road surface as far as the East Lodge was in a dreadful state and Valentine jammed his good hand against the roof to keep level, as they lurched between the potholes. His sister-in-law steered with immense concentration, her knuckles white, her gaze rigid.

‘When did you learn to drive?’

‘When the chauffeur left. It was just before Dunkirk, I think, and he told everyone he was joining the marines, and then it turned out he was driving a tea van around an airbase in Cheadle.’


Additional News. Doubleday have just published Lissa Evans’ ‘Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted’, a slim hardback based on her diary notes and memories as a producer on that famous comedy tv series. It would be interesting to read this alongside episodes of the Father Ted  TV series still available on Youtube or other platforms. Lissa Evans’s novels for children include Wed Wabbit and Wished.

Small Bomb at Dimperley is published by Doubleday

Lissa Evans' Old Baggage is reviewed here by Pippa Goodhart

More of Penny's choices:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

Guest review by Sue Clark: REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL by Nina Stibbe

 

"Humour is as hard – some would say harder – to pin down on the page than so-called serious stuff ... That’s why, when comedy works, it is such a joy."

Sue Clark’s comic fiction, Note to Boy, was published in 2020 and received a PenCraft Award for Literary Excellence. She’s been a writer virtually all her professional life. Before her first novel, she was a comedy scriptwriter for BBC radio and TV, as well a journalist, copywriter, PR and jill-of-all-writing-trades. Note to Boy has been described as ‘both funny and tragic’, ‘warm, funny and life-enhancing,’ and just plain ‘terrific.’ She’s currently working on her second novel, another comic creation. Find more on her website and on Twitter: @SueClarkAuthor

I love all kinds of comedic writing – novels, plays, films, TV shows, stand-up routines – bring them on! However, one thing I can never get my head around is why comedy is so often dismissed as a lesser art. As anyone who’s ever tried writing it will confirm, humour is as hard – some would say harder – to pin down on the page than so-called serious stuff. I know. I’ve spent a lot of my time trying! That’s why, when comedy works, it is such a joy.

In Reasons To Be Cheerful, Nina Stibbe manages the extraordinary feat of writing a comic novel that makes you laugh, while reflecting quite deep thoughts about what it meant to grow up in the English provinces in the 1980s. I’m aware, as I write this, that all views on books are subjective, and those on humorous books particularly personal. What tickles my funny bone, may bring yours out in a nasty rash. You may not agree but, for me, Reasons To Be Cheerful is that rare thing, a comedy triumph.

I picked up Stibbe’s book up during the darkest days of the pandemic, mainly, I confess, because of its title. In dire need of cheering up, I hoped this tale of eighteen-year-old Lizzie Vogel, aspiring writer and guerrilla dentist, as she navigates the tricky passage to adulthood, might hit the spot. I wasn’t disappointed. I laughed – once I read the description of trousers worn hoisted high in the “European way” I knew I was in for a treat – but I was also bowled over by its moments of insight.

Winner of both the 2019 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for Comic Fiction and the 2020 Comedy Women in Print (CWIP) prize, Reasons To Be Cheerful takes Lizzie, also the subject of two of Stibbe’s earlier volumes, Men at the Helm and Paradise Lodge, to the brink of womanhood.

The book teems with entertaining, richly observed characters and absurd situations, mainly centred around the goings-on in the dodgy dental surgery in Leicester. The characters are comic creations, true, but comic creations with depth and heart, whom you mostly care about and are invested in.

Lizzie herself is wonderfully bright and idiosyncratic, rivalling Adrian Mole for endearing naiveté and know-it-all pretension. Like him, she has ambitions to be a writer. I might be wrong, but I feel her character was inspired, at least in part, by the young Miss Stibbe, since they apparently share a love for words and an interest in teeth.

The story, told in Lizzie’s voice, chronicles her chaotic family, and a disparate gang of friends and work colleagues. These include: Adèle, her gloriously uninhibited mother, who believes, “a thoughtful visitor should aim to be fifteen minutes late … and slightly drunk”; Lizzie’s boss, Mr Wintergreen, a monstrous and incompetent dentist who employs Lizzie as his assistant and creepily insists she holds his cigarettes to his mouth for him as he smokes; and Andy, the boy who delivers the dental plates, and becomes Lizzie’s first boyfriend and the object of her sexual desire, though he prefers birding.

The less pleasant side of the 1980s is acutely and dryly observed, from the fashions – one character sports “apricot hair and matching lipstick” – to odious Mr Wintergreen’s racism and Lizzie’s sexist-but-hilarious list of Things Men Don’t Like Women Doing, which she fantasises about sending to a women’s magazine. It includes: “… having a dog, talking about sport, laughing loudly, spending money on fripperies, disagreeing with them, chatting on the phone, climbing trees, talking about dogs, mowing the lawn in flip-flops ...”

Stibbe has the knack – shared by writers like David Nicholls and Kate Atkinson – of holding up a humorous mirror to everyday life without teetering over into caricature. She clearly loves her characters and wants you to root for them – apart from Mr Wintergreen. And every now and then she drops in a line or two that touches your heart and, mid-guffaw, you find you have something in your eye.

To be able to locate that bittersweet spot where absurdity meets truth, and a belly laugh catches in the throat is a gift given to few writers. Nina Stibbe, I believe, has it.

A lesser art, indeed!

Reasons to be Cheerful is published by Penguin.

Sue Clark's Note to Boy is published by Unbound.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: JITTERBUG PERFUME by Tom Robbins - an appreciation

"He writes with the exuberance and mischief of a Lord of Misrule riding a Harley Davidson through the small towns of the Bible Belt ..."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. In spring 2019, Thames and Hudson will publish a revised edition of his books on the French Alps. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy books from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.' 

‘Quantum physics suggests a universal balance between immutable laws and random playfulness.’

Right.

Some critics don’t take Tom Robbins seriously despite the persuasive force of his intellectual quick-stepping, his discursus on mysteries of the spirit, his challenge to lazy thought, because he is playful and comic. Robbins finds this puzzling. ‘Comic writing is not only more profound than tragedy, it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to write’. Thus an exchange in Jitterbug Perfume:

‘The universe does not have laws.’

‘It has habits.’

‘And habits can be broken.’

Jitterbug Perfume skips between mediaeval Bohemia, Paris, New Orleans and Seattle. Its cast: a one thousand year-old janitor, a genius Seattle waitress, the proprietress of a New Orleans perfumerie, two old-school French parfumiers, a whacko doctor, founder of the Last Laugh Foundation for the exploration of immortality and brain science. And Pan, for his ‘pranksterish overturning of decorum…his leer and laughter when we took our blaze of mammal intellect too seriously’. When Christ was born, they say, the cry went up: ‘Great Pan is dead’, and no wonder that the humourless authoritarians of the church, horse-whipping childish mockery and a propensity to fun with the cured leather of doctrine, identified sulphur-eyed Satan as a revenant of the cloven-footed, horned, shaggy, sulphurous stinky god of panic, a male divinity associated with female values. And there’s the rub. Wild Pan, the embodiment of Nature’s green fuse, represents the dichotomy in our human nature, between the unruly impulses of our desires - for example, susceptibility to the seduction of perfume - and the timid reserve enjoined by the strictures of pious comportment and polite conformity. Wild shagginess against refinement. Into that dichotomy, as a nymph in this novel says, religion drove a wedge, and ‘Christ, who slept with no female…who played no music instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines and goddesses into muses’.

Is that playful or serious? Comic or tragic?

In the comedy of Jitterbug Perfume, as in all Robbins’s work, there is a fervent drive to reappraise what we may, laughingly, call received wisdom. The thousand year-old janitor (you’ll have to read the novel) concludes that whatever else his unprecedented life had been it had been fun, ‘he’d grown convinced that play – more than piety, more than charity or vigilance – was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.’

Not jokes. Jokes are sterile.

Robbins is clear on that, and however you characterise the humour – ‘They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning’… ‘She needed help but God was in a meeting whenever she rang’… ‘the sky over Seattle resembled cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck’ - it subverts, teases, prises and jostles sclerosed prejudice out of its hermetically sealed plastic wrappings.

Robbins unashamedly takes an intellectual blowtorch to the convention forbidding author’s point of view. He intervenes, he broadcasts paradox and animadversion with fiery delight and carefree disdain for accepted practice. He writes with the exuberance and mischief of a Lord of Misrule riding a Harley Davidson through the small towns of the Bible Belt and calling the god-fearing citizens out to a carnival jitterbug with a rowdy band and a celestial firework display, votaries of the great god Pan on bar duty.

But where (I hear you say) does the perfume come in?

‘Perfume, fundamentally, is the sexual attractant of flowers, or, in the case of civet and musk, of animals.’ The argument proceeds: perfume as the smell of creation, signal of Earth’s regenerative powers. No wonder the church equated perfume with sin, stench with holiness. Even Satan, downwind, recoiled from the odour of sanctity. For the perfume that masks body reek is an implicit invitation to sexual licence.

Robbins begins – and ends - Jitterbug Perfume with that most intense of vegetables, the beet. Its pollen is the base note for a scent which permeates the entire novel, a joyous fantasia on immortality and the logical impasse of death: a verifiable fact with elusive meaning or else meaning applicable to any thought process that seems if not reasonable, at least excusable.

‘The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold onto your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find that you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means:

Indigo.

Indigoing.

Indigone.’

PS It’s also a cracking story.

Jitterbug Perfume is published by No Exit Press.

Guest review by Anne Fine: WILD ABANDON by Joe Dunthorne

Anne Fine writes for adults and children. She has twice won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, as well as the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, two Smarties Prizes and other regional and foreign awards.

She was twice voted Children’s Author of the Year and was Children’s Laureate from 2001-3, when she set up My Home Library, a website that still offers freshly designed and freely downloadable modern bookplates to encourage young readers to form their own home libraries from the second hand books around them. She's published three anthologies of poetry for different ages called A Shame to Miss 1, 2 & 3. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded an OBE and her work is translated into over forty languages. Anne has two daughters and lives in County Durham.

I came to Wild Abandon, by Joe Dunthorne, partly by accident. I'd been reading a heap of those wonderful women writers whose work had been either so neglected or so unpuffed that I'd only recently caught up with some of them. (You know: Dorothy Whipple, Jennifer Johnston, Elizabeth Harrower, Rosamund Lehman, Emily Eden, Mollie Panter-Downes, Madeleine St John, etc etc etc).

And suddenly I thought, if I don't read something male and modern, I'll go mad. The first to be recommended to me by my ace metropolitan reader was London and the South-East, by David Szalay, and that was so much fun, and so insightful and funny about the life of an ad salesman, that I'm not surprised it won the Betty Trask Prize. Metropolitan Reader's next suggestion was Wild Abandon, which I have enjoyed so much I've chosen it for book group (who have also been busy over the last months catching up with some not quite so neglected or unpuffed women writers like Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Gardam and Vita Sackville-West etc etc etc).

Do 'em all good, I thought.

It will, too. Dunthorne tells the story of a ghastly sounding but well-meaning commune in wettest Wales. (This book will put anyone off the idea of roughing it in the countryside for ever.) Young Kate and Albert have grown up there, and, frankly, Kate is now growing out of the whole boiling, while Albert grieves (in an entirely mad but somehow credible way) because he senses his beloved sister will soon be off. (It's no accident that he's currently obsessed with The End of the World.) The marriage of their parents, the essentially kind and sympathetic - but no longer suited - Don and Freya, is steadily falling apart, the number of communards is dwindling, and a life's work and commitment is on the brink.

Everyone in the novel is strange or dopey/doped or downright weird, but every last one is believable. Dunthorne shows clearly both their outer faces and their vulnerable inner lives. He also copes brilliantly with his varied cast and impressively unravelling tale. The book is fast-paced, and entirely emotionally convincing with a genuine warmth and understanding shining through the comedy.


Wild Abandon is published by Penguin.