‘Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is, for me, her masterpiece’ Robert McCrum, ‘The Best 100 Novels’, Guardian
On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper.
Then one day Mrs Palfrey strikes up an unlikely friendship with an impoverished young writer, Ludo, who sees her as inspiration for his novel.
‘An author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth’ Sarah Waters
‘Elizabeth Taylor’s exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp and witty portrait of genteel postwar English life facing the changes taking shape in the 60s . . . Much of the reader’s joy lies in the exquisite subtlety in Taylor’s depiction of all the relationships, the sharp brevity of her wit, and the apparently effortless way the plot unfolds’ Robert McCrum, Guardian
There for the Duration
‘It changed my life!’ people sometimes exclaim about a book. While I am fairly certain that has never happened to me, a book certainly changed my book. In the summer of 2004 I had finished...
Read moreHands across the Tea-shop Table
The novel is set in the 1920s and 1940s. Both world wars are elided, the one before it opens, the other between one chapter and the next, but in the background is the fierce struggle of the...
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