Released biannually, catalogues outline our forthcoming publications. Spring catalogues include titles publishing between January and July, and Autumn catalogues include titles publishing between Augu...

Earlier in this month of #SpinsterSeptember hosted by @pear-jelly, I read The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym. I wanted to try and squeeze in another Pym before the end, and I really enjoyed reading…

(I feel nothing of that person now. But from the pictures, I can say that I was not unhappy then. I was relatively comfortable and, I thought, a success at what I had set out to do, which was to ra…

I dithered a bit about posting on Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey (1946) as although I enjoyed it, I wasn’t really sure if I could recommend it onwards. It’s an unusual novel written by an estab…

Despite having overflowing bookshelves and a mountainous TBR, I still always seem to amass multiple copies of individual titles, and today’s book is a good example of that. Back in the 1990s …

High Rising by Angela Thirkel Read on audio, RNIB Talking BooksHamish HamiltonPub. 1933, 233p...

It's Spinster September, so I'm giving Katherine Brooke (from Anne of Windy Poplars) the attention she deserves.

If you follow Nora (Pear Jelly) on Bluesky or Instagram, you’ll know that she’s currently hosting #SpinsterSeptember, a themed reading event showcasing books featuring unmarried women, from the cla…

A roundup of books I read in July and August 2026 including several titles for WIT Month.

If you follow Nora (Pear Jelly) on Bluesky or Instagram, you’ll know that she’s been gearing up to host #SpinsterSeptember, a brilliant reading event showcasing books featuring spinsters, from the …

If you follow Nora (Pear Jelly) on Bluesky or Instagram, you’ll know that she’s currently hosting #SpinsterSeptember, a themed reading event showcasing books featuring unmarried women, from the cla…

If you follow Nora (Pear Jelly) on Bluesky or Instagram, you’ll know that she’s currently hosting #SpinsterSeptember, a themed reading event showcasing books featuring unmarried women, from the cla…

I love Barbara Pym, an underappreciated writer whose gentle comedies of manners and unrequited love among the genteel middle classes are charming and quietly poignant. She creates an idiosyncratic …

Perceptive, engrossing and enigmatic, Look at Me – Anita Brookner’s third novel – is something of a minor masterpiece, probing as it does the inner life of a lonely young woman who experiences a br…

First published in 1956, Tea at Four O’Clock is a brilliant but desperately sad story of familial obligations, ulterior motives and long-held guilt, all set within the middle-class Protestant commu…

I love Barbara Pym, an underappreciated writer whose gentle comedies of manners and unrequited love among the genteel middle classes are charming and quietly poignant. She creates an idiosyncratic …

Abigail by Magda Szabó is a gripping boarding school novel that explores themes of female friendship, war, and resistance in the Hungarian countryside.

I love Barbara Pym, an underappreciated writer whose gentle comedies of manners and unrequited love among the genteel middle classes are charming and quietly poignant. She creates an idiosyncratic …

I’ve been meaning to get back to reading Barbara Pym, and what better time than #SpinsterSeptember, hosted by @pear-jelly. Pym fills her novels with ‘excellent women’ spinsters, although the charac…

Our Little Life: A Novel of To-Day J.G. Sime London: Grant Richards, 1921 394 pages Jessie Georgina Sime's debut novel begins with a tale of...

Helen Zahavi: Dirty Weekend, Flamingo/Macmillan, 1991 I don’t remember coming across this novel in the early 1990s when I first came to study in England, but apparently it caused quite a bit …

Stephen Benatar’s remarkable, deeply unsettling novel features one of the best depictions of the inner life of an unstable woman I’ve ever encountered in fiction. There’s a long tradition of female…

Back in 2023, I read and loved Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, a superb novel in which ‘Soldier’, a married woman in the early months of motherhood, experiences a loss of identity, an erasure of he…

I was in a small independent bookshop in Clapham when I came across Opening Night (2026) by Sara Baume. I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t leave an independent bookshop empty-handed &#82…

In Anne of Windy Poplars, by L.M. Montgomery, we're introduced to two resolute spinsters: Rebecca Dew and Katherine Brooke.

First published in 1977, at the height of Pym’s well-documented renaissance, Quartet in Autumn is a quietly poignant novel of loneliness, ageing and the passing of time – how sometimes we can feel …

Author/playwright “Josephine Tey” aka Elizabeth Mackintosh, is my candidate for Spinster Poster Girl [above]. Her book, Daughter of Time, is excellent. It’s the tie, isn’t it? Mark of a true spinst…

Lolly Willowes – the debut novel of the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner – was an instant success on its publication in 1926. Now regarded as something of an early feminist classic, it tells t…

Author/playwright “Josephine Tey” aka Elizabeth Mackintosh, is my candidate for Spinster Poster Girl [above]. Her book, Daughter of Time, is excellent. It’s the tie, isn’t it? Mark of a true spinst…