{"product_id":"a-house-in-the-country","title":"A House in the Country","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"std\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/7642\/5795\/files\/house_again.jpg?v=1641563305\u0026amp;width=700\" alt=\"\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePREFACE BY RUTH GORB\u003cbr\u003e280pp\u003cbr\u003eISBN 9781903155202\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e'And that's how life goes on, Cressida thought. Life goes on and on. The cabbages stand in rows, and somewhere men are clutching at wreckage in wild seas with oil burning on the water. Men are flying in close combat with death in the lonely sky, marching in quiet country lanes, driving lorries through English villages, poring over maps in deep, warm rooms that are never lit by daylight, filling up forms in offices where the rattle of typewriters never ceases. And women are doing most of these things too. Some of them are living new lives with more intensity than they could have imagined, but they are not all doing new things. Women are cooking, bathing their babies, standing in queues for fish, waiting for letters that do not come...'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis quietly profound but humorous 1944 novel is the story of Cressida Chance, who lives in Brede Manor in Sussex and lets out rooms to a variety of disparate characters brought together by the vagaries of the war. The \u003cem\u003eTLS\u003c\/em\u003e praised 'its evocation of the preoccupations of wartime England, and its mood of battered but sincere optimism'; and \u003cem\u003eThe Tablet \u003c\/em\u003eremarked on its 'compelling atmosphere and richly apt vocabulary.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe great interest of Jocelyn Playfair's book for modern readers is its complete authenticity. Set at the time of the fall of Tobruk in 1942, one of the low points of the war, and written only a year later when no-one had any idea what was going to happen, \u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eA House in the Country\u003c\/em\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003ehas a verisimilitude denied to modern writers. Sebastian Faulks in \u003cem\u003eCharlotte Gray \u003c\/em\u003eor Ian McEwan in \u003cem\u003eAtonement \u003c\/em\u003edo their research and evoke a particular period, but ultimately are dependent on their own and historians' interpretation of events; whereas a novel like this one is an exact, unaffected portrayal of things as they were at the time - that is, without the benefit of hindsight. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEndpaper\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"endpaper-caption\"\u003eThe endpapers show a 1942 Jacqmar scarf that was owned by a Persephone reader's mother; the indefatigable gardener at 'Brede Manor' is a symbolic figure in the book.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Jocelyn Playfair","offers":[{"title":"None","offer_id":54098757714227,"sku":"zbf1789694430724","price":31.2,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Tissue\/Endpaper","offer_id":54098757746995,"sku":"ira1789694430725","price":35.04,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Cambridge Imprint paper","offer_id":54098757779763,"sku":"hvf1789694430726","price":36.21,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Reusable fabric napkin","offer_id":54098757812531,"sku":"yym1789694430727","price":40.87,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0989\/0578\/4627\/files\/a-house-in-the-country_1.jpg?v=1789694435","url":"https:\/\/sandstepclad.shop\/products\/a-house-in-the-country","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}