mrs palfrey at the claremont book review

The characters are drawn with the perfect mixture of sympathy and detachment. There are other residents at the Claremont, gossipy old women and one old man, all with their own particular eccentricities and foibles, mostly on the verge of senility.

It is the story of Mrs Palfrey, a widow, who arrives at the Claremont hotel in South Kensington, where she wants to live out as much of the end of her life as she can. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is a book about old people. The prompt came when my agent (yes, this is a new, exciting development for the novel …) said that I might enjoy Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. Published by Virago, they have rather distinctive covers, which I’m not quite sure whether or not I like. The author, not the actress, just to clarify.Įver since I started working at the bookshop I’ve had half an eye on the little collection of Elizabeth Taylor novels lined up on the shelf. So I abandoned my resolution to read some new male non-fiction and settled down to something by Elizabeth Taylor. And then, after a week or so, the realisation sank in that I wasn’t actually reading a book at all. I found myself reading rather a lot of articles in magazines and listening to the radio more than usual. But that counted more as reading for work rather than reading for pleasure. I read a very fascinating book for research for my novel, Jewish London by Dr Gerry Black. I dipped in and out of the new Charles Nicholl book, Traces Remain, but, try as I might, couldn’t get into it. Having had a bit of a binge on mid-twentieth-century novels by women – I Capture the Castle, Mariana, Westwood– I felt that perhaps I should read something more recent, written by a man.

The feeling tends to arise when I am tired of reading a particular type of book, and feel that really I ought to read something different.

Given that I work in a bookshop, this feeling comes with an added tinge of guilt, of knowing that it is inexcusable to be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of books everyday, and not to be able to pick one out. There are few feelings I hate more than the anxious, distracted restlessness that arises from not knowing what to read.

Mrs palfrey at the claremont book review