Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Paperback

by Elizabeth Taylor (Author)

'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is, for me, her masterpiece' - Robert McCrum, Guardian, 'The Best 100 Novels'
'An author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth' - SARAH WATERS
'Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabath Bowen - soul-sisters all' ANNE TYLER

On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper.

Then one day Mrs Palfrey strikes up an unlikely friendship with an impoverished young writer, Ludo, who sees her as inspiration for his novel.

'Elizabeth Taylor's exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp and witty portrait of genteel postwar English life facing the changes taking shape in the 60s . . . Much of the reader's joy lies in the exquisite subtlety in Taylor's depiction of all the relationships, the sharp brevity of her wit, and the apparently effortless way the plot unfolds' -Robert McCrum 'the 100 best novels', Guardian

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'Devastating, delicate, hilarious and unflinching' David Baddiel

On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are a mixed bunch - magnificently flawed and eccentric - living off crumbs of affection and an obsessive interest in the hotel menu. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper. And then one day, Mrs Palfrey meets the handsome young writer Ludo, and an unlikely friendship is formed...

'Elizabeth Taylor's exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp and witty portrait of genteel postwar English life facing the changes taking shape in the 60s . . . Much of the reader's joy lies in the exquisite subtlety in Taylor's depiction of all the relationships, the sharp brevity of her wit, and the apparently effortless way the plot unfolds . . . Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is, for me, her masterpiece' Robert McCrum, '100 Best Novels', Guardian

Author Biography

Elizabeth Taylor (1912-75) is increasingly being recognised as one of the best writers of the twentieth century. She wrote her first book, At Mrs Lippincote's, during the war, and this was followed by eleven further novels and a children's book, Mossy Trotter. Her short stories appeared in Vogue, the New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar. Rosamond Lehmann considered her writing 'sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit', and Kingsley Amis regarded her as 'one of the best English novelists born in this century'.