One fine day

Mollie Panter-Downes was a great writer with a style as smooth as silk. She had a wide following for her New Yorker columns, but I encountered her by accident while browsing the fiction shelves in my university library. At first, nothing much happens in One Fine Day, which is set in England in 1947. And then, it seems to me, everything happens. I found myself thinking: this is life, as viewed from a hilltop. I've read the book multiple times, and I still can't see how she does it. I bought a copy on Amazon, a first edition. It is one of my favourite books: gentle, lucid, surprising, precisely constructed.