That Awkward Age

Gloriously funny novel about village life.

A Wing and a Prayer: A thoroughly enjoyable tongue-in-cheek look at village life...terrific fun

Mary Selby is a doctor, married to another doctor, who lives in a Suffolk village with her six children and four peacocks.  A former topless dancer, she met her husband while they were both at Cambridge.

When Robert Peabody, the new vicar, moved into the village of Bumpstaple, the villagers were naturally agog.  And when they discovered that, not only was he handsome enough to send the spinsters of the parish all a-flutter, he was also divorced, and a single parent, it was agreed that he could not be allowed to remain single for long.  Mavis Entwhistle, whose pastry had caused successive vicars to consider fasting as a desirable alternative lifestyle, had decided that her surprisingly lovely daughter Sally (for Mavis was no more endowed with a beautiful face than with a light hand at the pastryboard) would make the perfect vicar's wife. Sally, having beaten off her mother's attempts to marry her off to the washing machine repair man, the milkman and the baker's assistant, refused to meet this latest candidate for her hand, until a chance encounter in the mobile library led to some surprising and decidedly un-vicarish behaviour. <br/>
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Robert's son, meanwhile,  was trying to cope with adolescent confusion in the form of Claire, whom he met on the school bus.  Claire had quite enough to cope with, what with her spots and the dreadful embarrassment of her mother Tessa's advancing pregnancy - and at her age, too!  And as though this were not enough, she was having to put up with the child from her hell, her cousin Hugh, who had come to stay while his parents were abroad.  When Robert planned to hold a new-style Carol Service and Hugh decided to introduce a little realism into the Christmas story in the shape of Tessa's pet pig, the villagers began to wonder just what was in store for them.

Mary Selby

A thoroughly enjoyable tongue-in-cheek look at village life...terrific fun

In the quiet village of Great Barking, strange doings are afoot.Up at the Hall the squire, Sir George, seems to have exhausted his wife Angela - leaving her quite unable to contemplate the rigours of hosting the annual village fête in the Hall grounds.Caroline, the doctor's wife, has her time taken up with her three tiny children, but feels that as a newcomer to the village she should offer her own rather more modest garden as the venue for this important local affair. But who is to open it?Will Sir George's elderly mother, now somewhat unpredictable, be asked, as tradition dictates?Or should Sarah Struther, the voluptuous lady potter who prefers to work unencumbered by clothing and who has just been featured in a smart Sunday newspaper, be invited?<br/>
<br/>
The village fête committee decides that a commission to Sarah to fashion a special pot for the fête, to be entitled The Organ (suggesting the need for funds to combat dry rot in the organ loft) may be a better idea, little suspecting that the title may be open to misconstruction.And in the churchyard the tall privet bush has been lovingly fashioned by old Jacob Bean into a shape so curious that coachloads of sightseers start arriving to view it...

A Wing And A Prayer

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