A very fine day

     It is always gratifying to find that someone else shares your enthusiasm for a book, all the more so when you've given it to them in the hope that it will suit them and they will enjoy it as much as you do yourself.
   I'm delighted to have chosen well where the winner of the most recent book draw was concerned: Curzon won the prize which was Mollie Panter-Downes' One Fine Day, a top favourite novel of mine, and with Curzon's permission I shall copy here the message I got from her yesterday -

"I loved it! It seems to me to be in the strain of Quiet Desperation which imbues so much post-WWII womens' writing: the women had kept the home fires burning and taken over the mens' places in factories while the men were fighting, but no-one seemed able to express their profound disillusionment with the status quo after the war. In the tradition of Mrs. Dalloway, Saturday, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the 'biography' of an entire day is used to great effect. I'd hoped that more would flow from the encounter with the gypsy, but as a result Laura so far forgot herself as to fall asleep out of doors for many hours, which was clearly unusual. I'll look out for more MPD books now.

"I was close to the end of it yesterday, reading it leaning over my trolley in the queue to pay at Waitrose. The trolley rolled forward slightly and nudged the woman in front of me, so I apologised profusely and held up the book, explaining how involved I was in the story. The woman behind me in the queue leant round and said, "Well, if you like those old Viragos, you'll love Persephone Books"! "

To the book itself, and I'll quote one of the very first, hesitant posts I wrote on the original Cornflower:

"I don't often re-read books. I feel there's always some new wonderful thing to discover, so I follow the inviting-looking path winding off into the hidden distance and see where it takes me, but occasionally I revisit well-trodden ways. This book is one to return to. One Fine Day describes the events of a summer's day in 1946, charting the post-war world and the shifts in society as seen through a typical family in a typical English village.

Although it describes a vanishing - and now almost antique - way of life, it is a rhapsodic book, written with a poet's sensibilities, and the eye of a true observing recorder. Its brevity only intensifies its focus so that every word counts. Each page contains a carefully drawn sketch of a world found within an apparently insignificant moment, and its quality never wavers:

' "When I think how you were brought up," Mrs. Herriot had said reproachfully, conjuring up geranium-urned terraces over Italian lakes and tennis-party lemonade by the sweep of her knitting needle.'

'[Laura's] mind was a ragbag, in which scraps of forgotten brightness, odd bits of purple and gold, were hopelessly mixed up with laundry lists and recipes for doing something quick and unconvincingly delicious with dried egg.'

I discovered Mollie Panter-Downes through two collections of her short stories - Good Evening, Mrs Craven and Minnie's Room which I recommend highly, too. In fact, so much do I admire her work that I called one of my dogs after her, and really there can be no higher praise."

Comments

[ctussaud]

I was so thrilled to come out of the hat for this book; maybe Mollie Four-Legs picked me out as being a dog person! My reading in the past three or so years has been completely transformed by blogs, book newsgroups and my own terrestrial reading group. Before that I was the only person who chose what I read, but that has all changed. Now Cornflower, Dovegrey, Big Mouth, Harriet Devine and Susan Hill (inter alia) all inform my choices, and this is a huge improvement.

Unfortunately the TBR pile teeters dangerously, but I now know that I am not the only person who uses the end of each stair as book storage.

[Darlene]

I read Good Evening, Mrs Craven over Christmas and loved it more and more with each turned page. I will definitely have to add One Fine Day to my list. I couldn't agree more with ctussard, I've worked in a library for 19 years and have learned more about books through some of the blogs she mentioned, yours included!

[Simon S]

I havent read this but just wanted to say if you are ever in South London we have an independent book shop that has shelves and shelves of the green topes virago classics! Just so you know for future reference.

[Simon S]

By 'we' I mean the local residents of Tooting and Balham, I sadly dont actually own a bookshop... actually that could be a good thing I would never do any work!

[Nicola]

I've not read Mollie Panter-Downes. I really like the extract from One Fine Day. I'll look out for it.

[Rebecca Chapman]

One of my all time favorite books by a very fine author! So fortunate to have mistakenly bumped a fellow reader ... a fellow Persephone reader at that.

[Lisa W]

I read all three of these books last year following your reviews, and enjoyed each one. I started with "Good Evening, Mrs. Craven" and was quickly drawn into these entertaining stories. "Minnie's Room" followed. For me, "One Fine Day" was a quiet, thoughtful sort of story that appealed to all of the senses. She was a truly fine writer.

[Margaret Powling]

I adore One Fine Day and the cover of the Virago edition is the same painting Susan Hill's The Lighting of the Lamps (the painting is The Window by Charles Gunner, but you all knew that, didn't you?)

[Danielle]

I loved this book as well. It was one of my favorite reads of last year. I had to go looking for some of her other books, and got The Shoreless Sea via my library's ILL, which I think was her first novel. It wasn't quite up to the same standard as One Fine Day, but still very good--a story of first love and lost love. I wrote about it somewhere. I also have one of her books of short stories that I'm looking forward to reading.

[Lisa]

The illustration from the book just made me smile. I'm so tired of the dark, dreary days of winter.

[Elaine]

I love love love this book and I have the old Green Virago copy as well, a little worn at the edges now but will never be replaced by a 'new' one