A Few Green Leaves

I read several Barbara Pym novels almost 30 years ago. I put them in the book case and saved them. I moved them with me 7 or 8 times. I had forgotten why I was keeping them but I kept them. Then I re-read them. I was floored. The writing is right, I am not sure how else to explain it. The characters live their lives in smaller English towns and villages, they do this or that yet it is all there. Barbara Pym captures... Read Full Review

This novel is so very British, reserved, yet profound. It beautifully celebrates the cerebral machinations of a small Oxfordshire village and portrays the intertwined lives of its aging as well as its younger residents. Symptomatic of changing times, the village has two doctors, a Dr. G who is older and traditional and comforting, unwilling to dispense medicine but more than able to send his patients away with a platitude... Read Full Review

This is another review comparing Barbara Pym's books so that readers can choose between them.A FEW GREEN LEAVES is my favorite. After writing about London settings, Pym returns to the small country village of her beginnings. But, this village lacks the comfortable traditionalism of her earlier SOME TAME GAZELLE. Much of the book dwells on the changes that have come about in the English countryside by 1980. A FEW GREEN... Read Full Review

"A Few Green Leaves" is one of Barbara Pym's best novels. It is full of characters familiar to readers of Pym's other novels; rectors, widows, spinsters, eccentrics, anthropologists and a cat lady. There is romance, but in true Pym fashion it is not always suitable. It is subtly funny and poignantly sad, often at the same time. The heroine, Emma Howick, is a prototypical Pym spinster, intellectual, unsure and perhaps uninterested... Read Full Review