The Marmalade Diaries
The True Story of an Odd Couple
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'Charming, touching and very very funny' Jenny Colgan
'Simply too good' Daily Mail
From the author of the acclaimed THE GRAN TOUR
ONE HOUSE. TWO HOUSEMATES. THREE REASONS TO WORRY: WINNIE AND BEN ARE SEPARATED BY 50 YEARS, A GULF IN CLASS, AND MAJOR DIFFERENCES OF OPINION.
When hunting for a room in London, Ben Aitken came across one for a great price in a lovely part of town. There had to be a catch. And there was. The catch was Winnie: an 85-year-old widow who doesn't suffer fools.
Full of warmth, wit and candour, The Marmalade Diaries tells the story of an unlikely friendship during an unlikely time. Imagine an intergenerational version of Big Brother, but with only two contestants. One of the pair a grieving and inflexible former aristocrat in her mid-eighties. The other a working-class millennial snowflake. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go right?
Out of the most inauspicious of soils - and from the author of The Gran Tour - comes a book about grief, family, friendship, loneliness, life, love, lockdown and marmalade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this heartwarming memoir, travel writer Aitken (The Gran Tour) describes spending a year in lockdown with an elderly stranger 50 years his senior. After the U.K.'s first wave of Covid-19 receded in the fall of 2020, Aitken moved into octogenarian Winnie Carter's Victorian home in London, where he agreed to help around the house in exchange for reduced rent. When subsequent waves of Covid kept the two stuck indoors, the stage was set for a clash between Aitken's easygoing manner and Winnie's opinionated, exacting style. Aitken provides an irreverent day-by-day account of how, instead, the two forged an unlikely friendship as they bickered, watched Gardeners' World on television, and slowly got to know each other—Winnie revealing her grief over the recent death of her husband and the stress of caring for her adult son, who had cerebral palsy and resided in an assisted living facility. The unlikely duo share a palpable chemistry, and Winnie is the kind of larger-than-life character that novelists will wish they had invented ("I thought he was just another pale lump," she said about dining with Winston Churchill). Poignant and witty, this is a treat.
