A strange reading experience. I wasn’t sure if the novel was supposed to be a parody of E M Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady with a bit of the TV show Motherland thrown in, but it was quite an amusing read anyway.
The diary is written by a self-consciously middle-class woman without a first name (at least, if it was revealed, I never noticed) who married into the ancient and improbably-named Narwhal family. Her husband hasn’t got the money to maintain the crumbling mansion, while her sister-in-law is going through romantic crises. Mrs Narwhal is doing her best to keep everyone happy and prop the place up. Then her husband suddenly leaves and she has even more work to do. Can both her marriage and her house be saved?
I felt that the story eventually lost its way and I wasn’t interested in the side plot of the romance between two minor characters. The ending couldn’t have been anything else, but it was unsatisfactory in my opinion. Unless that was the point? Maybe that’s not the kind of life Mrs Narwhal wanted, but she has to accept it because nothing better is offered? It’s the same feeling I get from the endings of Austen’s novels.
In summary, worth a read. First published in 2021 by Louise Walters Books.