| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in One Fine Day (Virago Modern Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Mollie Panter-Downes is as profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker (INDEPENDENT )
Book Description
* A hymn to England and a vanished way of life, a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
The day promised to be hot. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
The day promised to be hot. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
One fine day is the experience of one day in 1946 of Laura Marshall (and to a lesser extent her husband Stephen and daughter Vicky). It's a hot, perfect summer day and Laura's thoughts range over the past and present, particularly the recent past. The war is over and she finds herself "remembering" this fact again and again as she realises that peace has finally come, and the threats of invasion and death have gone. As a middle-class woman whose life has been completely changed by the war, Laura can't help remembering how things used to be - servants at every turn, the garden perfect, her hair not grey, meals appearing on the table without her ineffectual efforts. As Stephen says "All his life he had expected to find doors opened if he rang, to wake up to the soft rattle of curtain rings being drawn back, to find the fires bright and the coffee smoking hot every morning as though household spirits had been working while he slept. And now the strings had been dropped, they all lay helpless as abandoned marionettes with nobody to twitch them." The novel is an elegy for a time before the war, and a recognition of the changes wrought by war, and thankgiving that the family has come through unscathed. It is a beautifully-written evocation of England, a vanished middle-class England long gone to us now, but in 1946, some people (including Laura's mother) hadn't come to terms with the change.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the most delicious and evocative of books, the descriptions written with a deftness that gives a perfect mental picture with the lightness of a summer breeze. You can feel the heat, smell the over-blown roses and see the views from the top of the downs. This is one of my favourite books and I read it as a 'pick me up' and it washes over me like a soothing fragrant balm.
Enjoy and cherish
Enjoy and cherish
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is an astonishing novel, far better than Mrs Dalloway, which it imitates but leaves behind in its eye for detail, its brilliant evocation of domestic life after the Second World War, its feeling for the nuances, the pleasures, the tragedies of life after the storm.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
One Fine Day by Mollie Paynter
A lovely book - a bit dated now, but so beautifully written and in a way a historical document in that it reflects the way in which middle class people felt about life immediately... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Mrs. Sma Beament
"All the troubles of the world come from everyone knowing how to...
In much the same way that Virginia Woolf shows the changes to everyday British life in the aftermath of World War I, author Mollie Panter-Downes shows the equally dramatic changes... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Mary Whipple
Lovely, a rural Mrs Miniver
'I am a perfectly happy married woman, simply getting a little greyer, duller, more tired than I should be getting, because my easier sort of life has come to an end. Read more
Published on 27 Aug 2009 by booksetc
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction
- Books > Fiction > Literary Fiction
- Books > Fiction > Psychological
- Books > Fiction > War
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
