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Love Among the Ruins

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Love Among the Ruins

By: Angela Thirkell
Narrated by: Catrin Walker-Booth
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About this listen

It's the summer of 1947, and peacetime has brought new challenges to Barsetshire. Beliers Priory, once a military hospital during the War, has now become a flourishing preparatory school for boys run by Leslie and Philip Winter.

When Charles Belton is hired as the new school master, six young people are thrown together in a web of flirtations and misunderstandings: Charles and his elder brother, Naval Captain Freddy Belton; Susan Dean, now Red Cross Depot Librarian, and her glamorous sister Jessica, an actress in thrall to the theatre; pragmatic Lucy Marling and her brother Oliver. And with the old social order in ruins, the scene is set for a delicious summer of comic - and romantic - possibilities.

Love Among the Ruins is a delightful, clever and wryly poignant classic, and the 17th novel in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series.

©1948 Angela Thirkell (P)2024 Hachette Audio UK Classics Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Small Town & Rural Comedy
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I couldn’t find how to return this book so I thought I might as well listen to the end to see if anything would happen. Not much did. Scores of people from earlier books drifted in and out, either with children or doing worthy jobs and still unmarried. It all seemed rather confusing and pointless. A big theme was how awful everything was in the immediate aftermath of the war and this was the most interesting part really- social history written at the time.
Eventually one couple got engaged.

The reader wasn’t bad and did interesting voices, which certainly helped in the lengthy (and largely pointless) conversations but she made some odd mispronunciations and wasn’t able to be sufficiently enthusiastic to make the prose sing. But then, who can blame her.

Don’t waste a credit on this.

The most boring Angela Thirkell I have come across

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Having read or listened to most of the previous books in this series I was pleased to see two more had been recorded and two more are in the pipeline. I enjoyed catching up with a lot of the old characters but there are a lot of them and it is quite hard to remember who is who! I found the information on the Angela Thirkell Society website very helpful in reminding myself who was related to who. I thought the narrator did a pretty good job although not quite as good as previous narrators and there were one or two rather odd pronunciations! I like Angela Thirkell’s brand of humour and find her books a fascinating depiction of life in 1930s and 1940s rural England, especially during the Second World War.

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