A Wreath for the Enemy
By (Author) Pamela Frankau
Daunt Books
Daunt Books
29th August 2023
6th July 2023
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
823.912
Paperback
312
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
Presently, on the sea floor, I began to find lost things; toraise the moods that were mine when I was fourteenyears old, sitting in this garden, writing my Anthology ofHates. I would begin there.
Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family's distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. Until she meets the Bradleys. Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class; everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears.
Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents. Compellingly told in a series of first-person narratives, A Wreath for the Enemy explores death, morality, friendship and shows just how brittle and chaotic our lives can become once they collide explosively with those around us.
Pamela Frankau (1908-1967) was abandoned by her novelist father, going on to become a successful writer from a very young age, and penning over thirty books. She also worked for the BBC during the Second World War.