Peace Breaks Out

by Angela Thirkell

Overview

'You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own' New York Times

It is 1945. When peace breaks out at last, familiar wartime routines are interrupted, and the residents of Barsetshire seem as disconcerted as they are overjoyed.

As the country's eligible young men return home, life regains momentum: before long, everyone is spinning in a flurry of misunderstandings and engagements. The older generation, though, sees that the world will never be the same again.

Both wry and poignant, Peace Breaks Out was written in the tumultuous year in which it is set. It is an unforgettable portrait of the joy and misgivings felt in the final days of the Second World War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780349007519
Publisher:	Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date:	11/03/2016
Series:	Virago Modern Classics , #374
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	202,184
File size:	884 KB

About the Author

Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was the eldest daughter of John William Mackail, a Scottish classical scholar and civil servant, and Margaret Burne-Jones. Her relatives included the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, and her grandfather was J. M. Barrie. She was educated in London and Paris, and began publishing articles and stories in the 1920s. In 1931 she brought out her first book, a memoir entitled Three Houses, and in 1933 her comic novel High Rising - set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, borrowed from Trollope - met with great success. She went on to write nearly thirty Barsetshire novels, as well as several further works of fiction and non-fiction. She was twice married and had four children.

Editorial Reviews

Both published in 1947, these two novels in the publisher's ongoing series of Thirkell reprints again chronicle life in the mythical British county of Barsetshire. This duo find the area adjusting to the changes brought on by the end of World War II.

Library Journal

Charming, very funny indeed. Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Pym herself—Alexander McCall Smith

You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own—New York Times

The novels are a delight, with touches of E. F. Benson, E. M. Delafield and P. G. Wodehouse—Christopher Fowler, Independent on Sunday

From the Publisher