This is a charming book. It’s warm and funny and gently satirical. It has a fairly unusual plot, and it's very entertaining. It's an easy read in the sense that the narrative carries you along, and it's so absorbing that it's hard to put the book down.
This book is set in the 1930's, in a small English village called Silverstream. The inhabitants of the village are a colourful lot, there are the steady souls who are neighbourly and helpful, the showy ones who tend to be taken up with their rivalries and their constant need to one up each other, the inoffensive, but eccentric ones, and of course, the gossips.
One of more steady people, is Miss Barbara Buncle. She's a woman in her thirties, who's lived in Silverstream all her life. She's a sensible and friendly soul, but she's a bit of a nobody in the village, because she's not exactly young, she's unmarried, and given her clothes and her mode of life, it's obvious that she hasn't got any money.
Miss Buncle has been trying to carry on as best she can on an ever shrinking income, but things are getting a bit dire for her, so she decides that she must do something. Neither she nor her maid, want to keep chickens or take in paying guests. So, she decides to try her hand at writing a book. Taking the advice that you must write what you know, she pens a novel set in an English village with characters who might well be her neighbours.
She draws a little too closely from life, however, and the result is a book, called Disturber of the Peace, with characters who are so lifelike and so appealing, that her book becomes a bestseller.
Soon, her neighbours discover the book, and they start reading it, one after the other. They recognise themselves and each other quite easily. Some of them are flattered, and others are amused, while a few of them are furious at being turned into characters in a book, and shown up in all their ridiculousness.
Disturber of the Peace is published under the rather obvious pseudonym of John Smith, which leads everyone in the village to wonder who it could be. They try to find clues in the book, they hold meetings, they go to their lawyers, they threaten the publisher, all to no avail. This makes for some really funny scenes in the book.
Miss Buncle never expected that anyone in the village would read her book, let alone react as strongly as they do. And now they’re hot on the heels of her identity, doing and saying things that provide her with more and more material to write about...and she can't resist.
This is a delightful read.