Books by Angela Huth

Angela Huth is one of our best-loved English authors: a writer of great elegance, compassion and nuanced observation. Not the Whole Story is her long-awaited memoir . . .

When the Harrisons arrive with an unexpected guest, Mary Dickinson, with whom Tom had a passionate affair three years previously, Tom has trouble putting her out of his mind. Will Tom and Alice's marriage survive the seductive onslaught of Mary who seems determined to get Tom to herself at last?

South of the Lights weaves the story of Evans and Brenda, lovers in a Midlands village, whose happiest hours are spent in the hayloft of the chicken farm on which she works. They have no other roof under which they can be alone together - until the mysterious, romantic Augusta comes to their aid. Evans' desire to possess Brenda results sometimes in passion, sometimes in violence, but Brenda finds sympathy in the company of the fragile and sweet-natured Lark with whom she shares a flat in the local town.Excelling in the illumination of the surprising facets of people's daily lives, Angela Huth reveals their private hopes, rages, fantasies and despair, with an original and moving blend of humour, imagination and pathos.

Estranged from her second husband, Jonathan, Clare Lyall is less sure than ever about the role men should play in her life.Her first husband, Richard, was much older than her, and his casual disregard for youth gradually hardened into indifference. And Jonathan, if anything, was too easy - too attentive, too concerned, and just a little too pedantic. So when she meets Joshua Heron at a party, the offbeat Clare isn't exactly thirsting for love. But she is mildly impressed when Joshua stubs his cigarette out on his thumb, and swayed still further by the advice of her new friend, the indomitable Mrs Fox. 'Take a lover,' she says, 'it's better to have a lover when you're young than neurosis when you're old...'Gentle, wistful and wry, Nowhere Girl is a beautifully controlled love story from the Booker Prize winning author of The Elected Member.

George Elkin has loyally trained as a solicitor in order to follow in his father's footsteps and run the family firm. But when his father dies, George resolves to follow his heart instead, looking after the West Country farm he grew up on. With the help of neighbours, his childhood friends Prodge and Nell, George is sure he can adapt to a rural lifestyle.Nell holds feelings for George she has kept hidden since their childhood and has long had the hope that their friendship would develop into something stronger. But then Lily, a woman George knew in his Oxford days, comes to stay and changes all of their lives and it seems that Nell's hopes will forever remain unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the rural community is facing a threat to its very existence: BSE, foot and mouth, government proposals on hunting - each crisis straining farmers and their livelihoods to breaking-point. And George and Prodge are faced with the awful knowledge that their future is out of their hands ...

The characters in Angela Huth's marvellous collection of stories are all winners or losers in the game of love: from the two friends competing in a gruelling cross-country marathon for the man they both wish to marry, to the lonely Cheltenham widow abandoning all decorum after too many Irish Coffees; from a seaside donkey owner giving away his favourite animal for the sake of a pair of sad grey eyes, to the husband taking up secret dancing lessons to please his dance-mad wife. A shrewd observer of human foibles with a fine sense of the comic and absurd, Angela Huth has written a blissfully entertaining, poignant and funny book of stories, which explore the nature and difficulties of love.

The married couples in this book have two things in common: a skill in the duplicity that flourishes even in happy marriages, and an invitation to the Farthingoes' ball. In the months preceding the party, we learn something of their double lives: the faces that each one exposes to their spouses and to the world give little hint of their complex and secret tribulations. By the time they arrive at the ball, each clutching his or her different hopes and fears, we have become familiar with their unsmooth paths, and shared many a humorous escapade or private tragedy with Rachel and Thomas, Mary and Bill, Ursula and Martin, Frances and Toby, as well as the alluring R. Cotterman and the only questing bachelor, Ralph. Sophisticated, sympathetic, witty and razor-sharp in its observations of the sub-text of married life, this is a wonderfully accomplished and enjoyable novel which develops totally out of the characters it creates.

This is a sparkling collection of short stories, dealing with love, loss and the tiny happenings that make up our everyday experience. Her most brilliant stories are about successful couples who own comfortable houses, enjoy interesting lives, raise attractive children - and commit adultery. On the other hand, the author is equally concerned with the old, the lonely and the hard-up, perceiving the exiguous sources from which they derive their hope or consolation and the last straws which drive them to despair. Like an experienced naturalist, she moves invisibly through social undergrowth, observing the quirks of human fauna, solitary, coupling, flocking, moulting, displaying or dying. Angela Huth has the gift of infiltrating the lives and minds of her characters whatever their age and social background.

First published in 1996, this collection of stories tells of the ghost of a doomed romance haunting an Oxford undergraduate's idyllic summer affair; a tragedy of hopeless love and murderous frustration is played out against the backdrop of a provincial repertory company; passion and hatred flower side by side in suburban back gardens. Angela Huth peoples her stories with elderly ladies living out extraordinary fantasy lives and betrayed wives wreaking subtle revenge, drawing out their secret disappointments and their dreams of glamour; she brings to this exquisite collection all the wry delicacy, subversive wit and keen eye for the drama of the quietest lives that characterise her acclaimed novels.

With the country's men at war, it falls to the land girls to pitch in and do their bit...Stella arrives at Hallows Farm in her Rayon stockings, having just waved goodbye to the love of life - naval officer Philip. Agatha has just graduated from Cambridge; life on the Farm is certainly going to offer her a different kind of education. Prue, a hairdresser from Manchester, is used to painting the town red, not manual labour. Joe dreams of leaving the family farm and becoming a fighter pilot. But with the arrival of these three beautiful young women, there's enough to keep him busy on the farm for the time being...Work is hard and the effects of war start to take their toll on the three women. But as the bonds of friendship start to form and excitement builds as the RAF dance looms, maybe life in the countryside isn't so bad after all?