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The Camomile Lawn
  • Published: 3 July 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099499145
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

The Camomile Lawn

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 June 2016
Paperback
3 July 2006
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A vivid and lively picture of wartime London and Cornwall as seen through the eyes of five cousins.

Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt's house for their annual ritual of a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with the heady exhilarations and freedoms of lost innocence, as well as the fears of the coming war.

The Camomile Lawn moves from Cornwall to London and back again, over the years, telling the stories of the cousins, their family and their friends, united by shared losses and lovers, by family ties and the absurd conditions imposed by war as their paths cross and recross over the years. Mary Wesley presents an extraordinarily vivid and lively picture of wartime London: the rationing, imaginatively circumvented; the fallen houses; the parties, the new-found comforts of sex, the desperate humour of survival - all of it evoked with warmth, clarity and stunning wit. And through it all, the cousins and their friends try to hold on to the part of themselves that laughed and played dangerous games on that camomile lawn.
  • Published: 3 July 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099499145
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

About the author

Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley was born near Windsor in 1912. Her education took her to the London School of Economics and during the War she worked in the War Office. She also worked part-time in the antiques trade. Mary Wesley lived in London, France, Italy, Germany and several places in the West Country. She used to comment that her 'chief claim to fame is arrested development, getting my first novel published at the age of seventy'. That first novel, Jumping the Queue, was followed by a subsequent nine bestsellers: The Camomile Lawn, Second Fiddle, Harnessing Peacocks, The Vacillations of Poppy Carew, Not That Sort of Girl, A Sensible Life, A Dubious Legacy, An Imaginative Experience and Part of the Furniture. Mary Wesley was awarded the CBE in the 1995 New Year's honour list and died in 2002.
MW

Also by Mary Wesley

Harnessing Peacocks
A Sensible Life
Darling Pol
A Dubious Legacy
Part Of The Furniture
Second Fiddle
An Imaginative Experience
See all

Praise for The Camomile Lawn

Provides equal does of sex and repression in war-torn Britain with panache and pace

The Times

A very good book indeed...rich in detail, careful and subtle in observation, mature in judgement

Susan Hill

It's hard to overpraise Mary Wesley's novel...so tingling and spry with life that put a mirror to the book and I'll almost swear it will mist over with the breath of the five young cousins

The Times

Extraordinarily accomplished and fast-moving

Financial Times

Wesley’s sharp, witty writing really is hard to match

i

With her light touch and uncensored imaginative range, Mary Wesley illuminates the violence and vividness of youth, the griefs and losses of age, the transience of life and of all the people and places we best know and love.

Guardian