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9780571378265

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"""A horribly delicious snapshot of post-war family life, in which tensions ensnare the reader in tinsel-covered barbed wire."" Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal ""A stylish and penetrating comedy of manners. My favorite Christmas book by far - and you can read it all year round."" Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry"

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Kathleen Farrell was born in London in 1912 and educated at a convent school. Her first book, Johnny's Not Home from the Fair (1942), was written while working for the wartime secretary-general of the Labour party, after which she founded a prestigious literary agency, eventually sold to a rival firm. Farrell lived in Hampstead for twenty years with her partner Kay Dick - reviewer, editor and author of They (1977) - in a literary circle including Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith and Olivia Manning. She wrote stories as well as five more novels - Mistletoe Malice (1951), Take It to Heart (1953), The Cost of Living (1956), The Common Touch (1958), and Limitations of Love (1962). Farrell's fiction was critically acclaimed for its savage wit and unsentimental humour, compared to Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen, but failed to find a popular audience, and - by the time of her death in Hove in 1999 - she had fallen into obscurity.

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