A House in the Country

This quietly profound but humorous 1944 novel is the story of Cressida Chance, who lives in Brede Manor in Sussex and lets out rooms to a variety of disparate characters brought together by the vagaries of the war. The TLS praised 'its evocation of the preoccupations of wartime England, and its mood of battered but sincere optimism'; and The Tablet remarked on its 'compelling atmosphere and richly apt vocabulary.'

The great interest of Jocelyn Playfair's book for modern readers is its complete authenticity. Set at the time of the fall of Tobruk in 1942, one of the low points of the war, and written only a year later when no-one had any idea what was going to happen, A House in the Country has a verisimilitude denied to modern writers. Sebastian Faulks in Charlotte Gray or Ian McEwan in Atonement do their research and evoke a particular period, but ultimately are dependent on their own and historians' interpretation of events; whereas a novel like this one is an exact, unaffected portrayal of things as they were at the time - that is, without the benefit of hindsight.