Available Formats
One Fine Day
By (Author) Mollie Panter-Downes
Little, Brown Book Group
Virago Press Ltd
5th March 1997
11th November 1985
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.912
Paperback
192
Width 128mm, Height 196mm, Spine 13mm
141g
It is a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria are forced to manage without 'those anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and pulled the strings'. Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see what it would have meant if the war had been lost, and looks to the future with a new hope and optimism. First published in 1947, this subtle, finely wrought novel presents a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war, its effect upon a marriage, charting, too, a gradual but significant change in the nature of English middle-class life.
'Mollie Panter-Downes is as profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker' INDEPENDENT
Mollie Panter-Downes was born in London in 1906 and died in 1997. In 1939 she began her distinguished London correspondence for THE NEW YORKER.