Barbara Comyns: 3 books

Bella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whose name she didn’t quite catch, and her once pretty face is disfigured by the scar she acquired in a car accident. Friendless and without family, she’s recently disentangled herself from a selfish and...

“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures.  Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems...

The story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing room windows, "quacking their approval" as they sail around the room. Then the miller drowns himself . . . Then the butcher slits his throat . . . and a series...