CHRISTMAS AT COLD COMFORT FARM AND OTHER STORIES

THE BACHELOR

Brother and sister, Constance and Kenneth Fielding live in calm respectability, just out of reach of London and the Blitz. But when a series of uninvited guests converge upon them – from a Balkan exile to the siblings’ own raffish father – the household struggles to preserve its precious peace. In this full house, in a quiet corner of suburbia, no one expects to find romance.

COLD COMFORT FARM

Flora Poste, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming, until Flora manages to set things right.

CONFERENCE AT COLD COMFORT FARM

Robert Poste's child is back at Cold Comfort Farm. But all is not well. Flora finds the farm transformed into a twee haven filled with Toby jugs and peasant pottery, and rooms labelled 'Quiete Retreate' and 'Greate laundrie'. It is, Flora winces, 'exactly like being locked in the Victoria and Albert Museum after closing time'. Worse, the farm is hosting a conference of the pretentious International Thinkers Group - a group made up of the 'sadistic owl' Mr Peccavi, loathsome Mr Mybug and the overpowering Mrs Ernestine Thump. And worst of all, there are no Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm. Once again the sensible Flora decides to take the situation in hand.

THE MATCHMAKER

After a war-time bomb destroyed their house, a family finds new relationships when they move to a temporary home in a country cottage.

NIGHTINGALE WOOD

Viola is a young widow left penniless by her late husband. She is forced to live with his family : a miserly father-in-law, a snobbish mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law. A satirical tale of a modern-day Cinderella.

THE WOODS IN WINTER

Ivy Gover, a curmudgeonly middle-aged charwoman with witchy talents, inherits a rural cottage in a tiny Buckinghamshire village. Once settled in with a rescued dog and a pet pigeon, she manages, despite her anti-social instincts, to have surprising effects on her new neighbours, including Angela Mordaunt, a spinster still mourning her dead beau, Coral and Pearl Cartaret, ditzy sisters who have just opened a tea shop, the local vicar, and wealthy Lord Gowerville, whose devotion she earns by healing his beloved dog. But her biggest challenge will likely be the 12-year-old runaway who shows up at her door...