![]() ![]() Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie (1956) While Green’s interest in psychology is evidence of his debt to Woolf, The Decameron is in fact the work to which Party Going most strikingly alludes.ĥ. When a heavy fog brings train travel in England to a halt, a group of bright young things retreats to a suite of rooms in a London station hotel, where they proceed to throw a riotous and emotionally fraught party to pass the time until the trains can depart. This great novel from the 20th-century master of the gerund – his other books include Living, Loving, Doting, Concluding, and Nothing – takes place over the course of just 24 hours but took its author seven years to write. My favourite line concerns Margot’s teenage son, Peter, who serves the cocktails: “Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book.” I can’t think of a funnier house party than the one that Margot Beste-Chetwynde throws at her scarily modernist country house, King’s Thursday, and then decides not to attend. At once deft, rigorous, and deeply sad, Woolf’s great work exposes the private dramas of desire and compromise that underlie and sometimes undermine the rituals of public interaction.ģ. Just as Mrs Dalloway may be the most justly famous hostess in literature, so this may be the most justly famous novel to centre on a party. ![]() Vanessa Redgrave in the title role of Mrs Dalloway (1997). The threat of mortality lends an undercurrent of dread to the tales that comprise this remarkable work, in which storytelling itself is posited as an antidote to mortality. In the age of Covid-19, where better to start a list of house-party novels than with the book that defines the genre? Fleeing plague in Florence, 10 young aristocrats take refuge in a villa in Fiesole, where they pass the time by telling one another stories. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353) Whatever the case, I can think of no better time than the moment we’re living through, when parties of any kind are a wistful memory, to cast a backward glance at these 10 great books. (For those of you who have not, you have a treat in store.) Henry Green’s Party Going, for instance, takes place in a hotel – a deviation from the rule that will, I trust, pass muster for those of you who have read this magnificent novel. Most take place in country houses – but not all. Thus most of the novels I have chosen are British – but not all. In compiling this list, I have tried to do justice to the house-party tradition while expanding its parameters to allow for the inclusion of works that hew to its spirit if not its conventions. (Not in England, however, but in Connecticut.) Bring a bunch of characters together, put words in their mouths, and see what happens: this was the formula that I emulated when I wrote Shelter in Place, a novel much of which takes place in a country house where a group of friends have gathered, basically, to eat and talk. Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett: what these writers share is an instinct for how to move a narrative forward through dialogue. ![]() Praise for The Erdington Mysteries "a masterful plot full of suspense and twists that kept me up reading late into the night.And though, as I grew older, I continued to relish the period details, the descriptions of clothes and furniture, the inevitable digressions about the inadequate heating, I found myself relishing even more the conversations. Journey to the 1930s Cragside Estate, to a period house-party where no one is truly safe, and the estate is just as deadly as the people. ![]() But there are many who don’t want her to succeed, and as the number of murder victims increases, the possibility that she might well be the next victim, can’t be ignored. Quickly realising that these new murders must be related to that of her beloved husband, Lady Merryweather sets out to solve the crime, once and for all. Released, due to a lack of evidence, Lady Ella returns to Cragside only to discover a second murder has taken place in her absence, and one she can’t possibly have committed. Perhaps, there are no friendships to be found here, after all. But, no sooner has she arrived than the body of one of the guests is found on the estate, and suspicion immediately turns on her. The isolated, but much loved, Cragside Estate in North Northumberland, home of her friends, Lord and Lady Bradbury, holds special memories for her. Apprehended for the murder of her husband the year before, and only recently released, she hopes a trip away from London will allow her to grieve. Lady Merryweather has had a shocking year. From the author of The Erdington Mysteries, a classic 1930s murder mystery house party. ![]()
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