The Two Mrs Abbotts

This is the third book in a trilogy. In the first, Miss Buncle’s Book (1934), Miss Buncle, gloriously, wrote a novel about the village she lived in and then had hastily to depart because the true identity of ‘John Smith’, the author, was about to be revealed. In Miss Buncle Married (1936), she marries her publisher and leaves Hampstead for Wandlebury, a village within commutable distance of London. This one, The Two Mrs Abbotts, starts with one of the characters in Miss Buncle’s Book arriving in the village to give a talk for the Women’s Institute and to stay with Mrs Abbott, not knowing that it is her old friend Miss Buncle, mother by now of two children. And after that there is the usual intensely readable round of events, none of them earth shattering, none of them pertaining to ‘great literature’, but the novel is wonderfully enjoyable and although perhaps not quite as witty and fun as Miss Buncle’s Book, it is a very good and entertaining read.