Jane Gardam

Jane Gardam is a writer at the height of her powers, well-known for her caustic wit, free-wheeling imagination, love of humanity and wicked powers of observation - and for the hint of the bizarre and the surreal that she brings to her fiction. This is a collection of her short stories.

The title, first of all, is an acronym, and stands for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong." Old Filth -- or Dear Old Filth, when the story starts -- is Sir Edward Feathers, a wealthy old Englishman. As a penniless young man, Eddie Feathers left postwar London and made a magnificent fortune -- "a great stack of money" -- as a Hong Kong barrister, retiring as a judge and returning to England to live out his days.

Relates the joys and sorrows of adolescence as experienced by a young girl growing up in a boy's boarding school.

A young girl aspiring to be a writer recounts her experiences growing up in England during the Second World War.

Abandoned by her widowed father, Kit rides the Orphan Train west where a farm family takes her in to help with chores, never expecting that one day she would overcome all the obstacles before her and become a successful writer.

"It is the summer of 1946. It is a time of clothing coupons and food rations, of postwar deprivations and social readjustment. In this precarious, new world Hetty Fallowes struggles to become independent of her suffocatingly possessive mother, whose jealousy of her daughter runs almost as deep as her pride in Hetty's accomplishments. While the bookish Hetty rebels intellectually against her family, her best friend, Una Vane, asserts her nascent womanhood with a sexually interesting fellow from the wrong side of the Yorkshire tracks and the left side of local politics. And Liselotte Klein, a Jewish refugee who arrived solitary, plump and clever from Hamburg in 1939 to be billeted by Quakers, comes through painful trials in London to surprising possibilities.". "By the summer's end, all three young women in this poignant, beautifully realized novel have begun to learn that they, like their parents, know neither everything nor nothing - and that a ticket to the future is issued in the past."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of haunting stories___

A novel which begins at the turn of the 20th century and follows the life of Polly Flint through the century. Polly goes to live on the isolated northeast coast of Yorkshire with her spinster aunts when she is six and remains there into her own old age. Often feeling marooned, she regards Robinson Crusoe as her hero.

In England, a housewife eggs on another to liberate herself and when the other abandons her family to travel the world pursues her with letters. The missives, a jumble of apologies, condemnation, admiration, envy and confessions of her own unhappiness, portray the loneliness and boredom of suburban life.

Yound Harry Bateman comes from London with his family year after year to spend the summer at Light Trees Farm in the Cumbrian free country, until he feels that it is his real home.

Bridget fears that she will have to give up William, her pony, because bad weather has brought hard times to her parents' farm. Then William becomes the hero of the hour.