Mary Wesley Livres

On an expanse of sweet-smelling grass at the edge of the Cornwall cliffs, a family gathers on one of the last halcyon days before World War II. But for five unconventional, adolescent cousins - Polly and Walter, who are brother and sister; Oliver, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War; the illegitimate , orphaned Sophie; and the beautiful, self-assured Calypso - the chamomile lawn becomes a garden of sexual tension and temptation. They play their childhood chase game , the Terror Run, and talk about losing their innocence. when the war comes, with death a constant menace and sexual conventions rejected, it adds a reckless zest to their lives, and their games become realities.

Matilda Poliport, recently widowed and largely estranged from her four adult children, has decided to End It All. But her meticulously planned bid for graceful oblivion is interrupted when she foils the suicide bid of another lost soul - Hugh Warner, on the run from the police - and life begins again for them both.

She was a thin, lonely child with huge eyes and an extensive vocabulary of French foul language. Amongst the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in Dinard in 1926--leading their privileged lives of secure routine pleasures--Flora was a ten-year-old misfit. Ignored by her self-absorbed parents, unloved, and pitied by the pleasant, stylish people in Brittany that summer, Flora was--peripherally--included in their gracious circles. And there, meeting kindly civilised people for the first time, she fell in love--with Cosmo--with Hubert--with Feix. It took forty years for the love affairs to be explored, consummated and finally resolved. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Early in 1941, having just seen off at Euston Station the two young men whom she has loved for the best part of her seventeen years, Juno Marlowe is hurrying down a London street with her ill-fitting shoes in her hands.  Airplanes thunder overhead; a battery of guns opens up.  When a stick of bombs falls she cowers, then takes to her heels in flight.  She is rescued from this nightmare by a gaunt stranger, frail and older than his years, and, guiding her up his front stairs, he offers her the protection of his house.Given this respite from the bleakness of having no home and no family to turn to, Juno first encounters tragedy, then a series of events which take her to a house in the West Country and the blossoming of an English spring into which war only occasionally intrudes.  Here she may find peace; here she will no longer be part of the furniture.  Part of the Furniture completes the triptych of wartime novels begun with The Camomile Lawn and A Sensible Life.

Hebe has harnessed her two great talents - cooking and making love - to make a living for herself, but when the separate strands of her life become intangled the even tenor of her days is threatened, and her world changes forever.

After her husband's funeral, Rose looks back on a life of dual constancy, passion, humour and the ambiguities of love - and chooses her future. A witty and charming love story among the British middle classes with surprising twists.

A traveller on a train smells the burn of brakes on the rails as the train stops suddenly in the countryside. Looking out the window, he sees a white-faced woman leap from the train in aid of a stranded sheep. The image lodges in his mind, a familiar despair he knows.

Poppy Carew has just been dumped by her unscrupulous boyfriend, Edmund, when her beloved and eccentric father dies, leaving Poppy one last request - that she ensure he is buried in style by a 'fun' undertaker - and one large fortune.

When James and Matthew spent the weekend with Henry Tillotson in 1954, they took an instant liking to the country house that Henry had inherited from his father. His wife was a bit odd though - she never seemed to get out of bed. Gossip suggested that Henry had inherited her as well.

Beautiful, independent and brazenly manipulative, 40-ish Laura Thornby plays muse to 23-year-old aspiring novelist Claud Bannister in "Wesley's mordantly humorous take on upper-middle-class British life,"