Opening at the Hay Festival, and ending with the prospect of a spring wedding, Sue Gee's novel is a lively story of tangled relationships and the sustaining powers of good books, loyal friends and conversation.
It's 1962 and Natalie Marx is shocked when her mother receives this reply to her enquiry about summer accommodation in Vermont: 'Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles.
When Richard Slater receives a letter of complaint from one of his constituents, a Margaret Hayton, he merely responds with his standard letter of empty promises.
St Radegund's College, Cambridge, which admits only women students, breaks with one hundred and sixty years of tradition by appointing a man, former BBC executive James Rycarte, as its new Head of House.
When Emily Kingsley arrives at the church, late and sad, for her Great Aunt Mary s funeral, she has no idea that her life is about to change completely.
In April, when blackthorn blossom clothes the hedgerows like a wedding veil, there sometimes comes a frost so severe that it seems as if the summer will never come.
This is the story of Mina, a girl at a Sheffield call centre whose next customer in the queue is Peter, a Cambridge geography don who has crashed his car into a tree stump when swerving to avoid a cat.
