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Pym is only teasing the reader with her hints at genre fiction, however, and once I stopped waiting for a body to be found A Few Green Leaves rather grew on me. It is a delicate miniature, but it offers subtle comedy, with a nice turn in irony and some sharp insights, even if these are delivered so gently they are easy to miss. Pym's model is obviously Jane Austen ("3 or 4 Families in a Country village is the very thing to work on") and like her she fits a surprising amount into a limited canvas. But the world Pym describes is, unlike Austen's, fragile and in flux: the manor is no longer occupied, new bungalows have been built, and the outside world unavoidably intrudes. A Few Green Leaves. Barbara Pym was an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives. With warmth, humour, precision and great vividness, she gave her best characters an independent life we recognise as totally familiar. In A Few Green Leaves, her last novel, her heroine is Emma Howick, anthropologist. Through her eyes Barbara Pym examines in her own ironic and individual style the quiet revolution in English village life, combining the rural settings of her earliest novels with the themes and characters of her later works. The result is a . Read More. Barbara Pym was an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives. With warmth, humour, precision and great vividness, she gave her best characters an independent life we recognise as totally familiar. In A Few Green Leaves, her last novel, her heroine is Emma Howick, anthropologist. Through her eyes Barbara Pym examines in her own ironic and individual style the quiet revolution in English village life, combining the rural settings of her earliest novels with the themes and characters of her later works. The result is a compelling portrait of a town that seems to be forgotten by time, but which is unmistakably affected by it. Romance shares the pages with death in this engaging novel that is the culmination of Barbara Pym's acclaimed writing career. 'I could go on reading her for ever' A L Rowse, Punch 'A vivid sense of how we live now' New Statesman 'Her sense of brilliant comedy is a direct inheritance from Jane Austen' Hibernia 'A beautifully written, very delicate comedy' The Times Literary Supplement Read Less. All Copies ( 42 ) Softcover ( 32 ) Hardcover ( 9 ) Choose Edition ( 9 ) Book Details Seller Sort. Brownstown, MI, USA. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, Good Details: ISBN: 0586054251 ISBN-13: 9780586054253 Pages: 224 Edition: New edition Publisher: Grafton Published: 1981 Language: English Alibris ID: 16629815108 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. Brownstown, MI, USA. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, Good Details: ISBN: 0525485112 ISBN-13: 9780525485117 Pages: 224 Publisher: Grafton Published: 1989 Language: English Alibris ID: 16660778064 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. Plantation, FL, USA. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, New Details: ISBN: 0586054251 ISBN-13: 9780586054253 Pages: 224 Edition: New edition Publisher: Grafton Published: 01/1981 Language: English Alibris ID: 12298385765 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New. New Unread Book, may have some minor shelf wear. Fast Shipping, Excellent Customer Service, Satisfaction Guaranteed. ► Contact This Seller. Frederick, MD, USA. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, Good Details: ISBN: 0525485112 ISBN-13: 9780525485117 Pages: 224 Publisher: Grafton Published: 1989 Language: English Alibris ID: 16046343164 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. Good condition. ► Contact This Seller. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, Fair Details: ISBN: 0586054251 ISBN-13: 9780586054253 Pages: 224 Edition: New edition Publisher: Grafton Published: 1981 Language: English Alibris ID: 16604727059 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Fair. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. Halethorpe, MD, USA. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, Good Details: ISBN: 0586054251 ISBN-13: 9780586054253 Pages: 224 Edition: New edition Publisher: Grafton Published: 1981 Language: English Alibris ID: 16669637139 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. Halethorpe, MD, USA. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, Fair Details: ISBN: 0586054251 ISBN-13: 9780586054253 Pages: 224 Edition: New edition Publisher: Grafton Published: 1981 Language: English Alibris ID: 16631946816 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Fair. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. Brownstown, MI, USA. Edition: 1981, Grafton Hardcover, Good Details: ISBN: 0816138400 ISBN-13: 9780816138401 Pages: 224 Edition: Large type / large print Publisher: Grafton Published: 1985 Language: English Alibris ID: 16675306108 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. Edition: 1981, Grafton Hardcover, Fair Details: ISBN: 052510450X ISBN-13: 9780525104506 Pages: 224 Publisher: Grafton Published: 1980 Language: English Alibris ID: 16456443288 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99 Trackable Expedited: $7.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Fair. No dust jacket Ships Fast! Satisfaction Guaranteed! ► Contact This Seller. Edition: 1981, Grafton Paperback, Good Details: ISBN: 1559212284 ISBN-13: 9781559212281 Pages: 224 Edition: Revised edition Publisher: Grafton Published: 1999 Language: English Alibris ID: 16650116869 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99 Trackable Expedited: $7.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. A FEW GREEN LEAVES. Pym's last novel--she died in January 1980--returns to the English-village/ Anglican-church ambience of her early, recently-resurrected successes (, ). . . as anthropologist Emma Howick, an un-pretty spinster nearing 40, spends a year or so in her professor mother's cottage in a wee hamlet near Oxford. And through the months of creakingly traditional small occasions--church flower- arranging, bus outings, teas, lunches, jumble sales--Emma meets a generally sad, very Pym-esque assortment of neighbors: minister-widower Tom, who lives for local history; his housekeeping spinster sister Daphne, who lives for her Greece vacations; old Dr. G., who prescribes buying a new hat for most ills; young Dr. Shrubsole and wife, who covet the spacious rectory; trendy bachelor restaurant-reviewer Adam, whose purchases of tight jeans are often unfortunate. True, some changes do occur as time goes by: illness, death, visits; Daphne moves out to live with a friend (diary- keeping Tom wonders: ""What was he to write about the events of this morning? 'My sister Daphne made a gooseberry tart and told me that she was going to live on the outskirts of Birmingham'? Could that possibly be of interest to readers of the next century?""); an old academic flame of Emma's moves into a nearby forest cottage and toys with her affections and her kitchen (she's forever carrying casseroles into the woods); Emma then finds herself drawn to the rector--""Would he, for example, be capable of cleaning her top windows, which was what she really needed?""-- and ends up with rather unconvincing optimism, looking forward to ""a love affair which need not necessarily be an unhappy one."" But if Emma is an only half-sketched heroine, there's real, modest achievement here--in the accumulation of tiny, touching, ironic observations and reflections: the ways that lonely lives revolve around food (""the packet of savoury rice, the ever-useful fish fingers. . .""); a woman who's unnerved by winning a bottle of red wine in a lottery (""so dark and menacing""); a church florist who loses his faith after seeing those ""talks on the telly"" (a reverend ""wearing a green turtle-neck jumper--I ask you!""). With neither the smiling, sharp edges of the early work nor the perfectly controlled pathos of Quartet in Autumn (1978), this is minor Pym--really just a neutral-toned catchall of her acute angles on loneliness and the ravages of time- marching-on--but readers with the appropriate expectations will find it quietly exact, gently amusing, and (except for that dubious happy ending) genteel-ly heartbreaking. ISBN 13: 9780525485117. In A FEW GREEN LEAVES the author combines the rural settings of her earliest novels with many of the themes- and even some of the characters- of her later ones. Switching points of view among many characters, she builds with accumulating effect the picture of life in a town forgotten by time yet affected dramatically by it. Historical time- represented by Druid ruins, the local eighteenth-century country manor, and the last aristocrats who occupied it in the 1920s- is juxtaposed against the banalities of life in today's world. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Barbara Pym, who died on January 11, 1980, spent the last few years of her life in an Oxfordshire village, sharing a small cottage with her sister. In 1977, after sixteen years in the wilderness she published QUARTET IN AUTUMN. It was treated as a major literary event, as was her next novel, . "All the people in A Few Green Leaves are completely realistic; the sort of people we meet every day of our lives and never particularly notice. Miss Pym's art endows them with a significance which they could never possess in life." -- Times Literary Supplement.