A Far Cry From Kensington
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
I can't help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can't stop them. It feels like preaching the gospel.
When publishing assistant and war widow Nancy Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he 'urinates frightful prose', the repercussions are swift. Losing not one, but two, much-sought-after literary jobs, Mrs Hawkins finds herself embroiled in a mystery involving anonymous letters, quack remedies and blackmail. Years later, and a far cry from Kensington, she looks back with a sharp and mischievous eye at the cost of telling the truth.
Introduced by Ali Smith.
'Mercurially funny, playful and mischievous' Ali Smith
'I was in heaven reading this book. . . just blissful' Stephen Fry
'Funny, astringent, shrewd, her take on life is wonderfully bracing' William Boyd
'Wonderfully entertaining' Sunday Telegraph
'An outstanding novel . . . A Far Cry From Kensington has an effortless, translucent grasp of the spirit of the period' Observer
'The divine Spark is shining at her brightest . . . Pure delight' Claire Tomalin
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even the title is witty in this latest of Spark's delightful novels, bearing as it does at least three layers of ambiguity. It is a tale told in a splendidly commonsensical way by Mrs. Hawkins, a buxom young war widow who is a tower of strength in a failing London publishing house during the lean years after WW II. She is surrounded, both at work and in her seedy Kensington boarding house, by those slightly off-center eccentrics the Englishand particularly Sparkdraw to perfection; everything on the surface seems utterly realistic, yet fantasy as rich as anything in Garcia Marquez is only a breath away. Mrs. Hawkins selects a hate object among the literary hangers-on at her firm, and that hatred changes her life. She also becomes involved with a Polish dressmaker with a dark secret, invents a supremely successful method of dieting and almost in spite of herself becomes happy. Spark knows the wonderfully zany world of postwar-London publishing backward, her wit has never been more telling, and any book person is going to gobble this up. A sample, to whet the appetite: ``Publishers, for obvious reasons, attempt to make friends with their authors. Martin York tried to make authors of his friends.''
