Harriet Waugh
My first two choices are novels. Both, coincidentally set before the Second World War, follow the development of a child through girlhood to monstrous middle age. Both are social comedies. Molly Keane's Good Behaviour (Deutsch) is set in AngloIrish country-house discomfort where Hunting, Shooting, Fishing and Fornication are the order of the day. What should not happen remains invisible even if it kills, or in the case of the heroine turns you into an absurd, malign heffalump. Pleasure and pain helplessly entwine. Emma Cave's heroine, however, faced with many of the same dilemmas in upper-class England, takes more dramatic control of her destiny. Nifty Pitty (Collins), although missing some of the reverberations that make Good Behaviour so successful, is the most thoroughly enjoyable novel I have read this year. It appears not to have received critical attention, possibly because of the dreadful blurb and appalling, slushy cover. A pity.
My other choice is Margaret Kahn's Children of the Jinn (Sidgwick and Jackson) that tells of her quest to get to know the Kurds and of the mounting paranoia of her dealings with Iranians. It is a rivetting book about cultural conflict. When at last the doorway to Kurdistan opens for her it also opens delightfully for the reader.
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