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Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Jul 3, 2025 10:50 AM

Author:Stella Gibbons,Emma Handy,Libby Purves

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

Brought to you by Penguin.

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. All the he-cousins have gone abroad to make their fortunes and the female cousins are having a pretty thin time of it. Once again the sensible Flora decides to take the situation in hand.

© Stella Gibbons 2011 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Reviews

Gibbons was an acute and witty observer, and her dissection of the British class system is spot-on.

—— Mail on Sunday

Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the twentieth century

—— Lynne Truss

Most of us wish we knew a real Flora Poste who could put straight our pretzeled lives

—— Julie Birchill , Sunday Times

A biting dissection of privilege, race, inequality and ideology in 21st-century Britain.

—— i

I was bowled over by this barbed, supple book about precarity and power, both for its spiky, unsettling intelligence and the frank beauty of the writing.

—— OLIVIA LAING

A stunning achievement. Three Rooms is both assertion and interrogation: of the world, our immediate landscape, ourselves. Hamya's writing is silken, delicate yet tough, successfully bearing the weight of deft observations that unsettle, even while they bear witness. Her assured candour is awe inspiring, truth telling rarely feels so immersive, so enjoyable a read. I'm full of curious excitement about what she'll write in the future. In every way possible, Three Rooms is a novel for our times.

—— COURTTIA NEWLAND

Jo Hamya is an exceptionally gifted writer. Her portrait of a bright young woman struggling to get a foothold in an indifferent world is acute, informed, and deeply felt. Three Rooms slowly but surely broke my heart.

—— CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT

Three Rooms is brilliant, and brilliant in new ways. Jo Hamya's writing is full of unexpected angles and original, vivid approaches; it's intelligent, melancholy, funny and subtle.

—— CHRIS POWER

Three Rooms is a masterpiece of attentiveness. Hamya's rooms are not just filled with furniture, air and light, but with social codes and gestures, politics, privileges and precarities; they are rooms filled with all the clatter and pressure and bullshit of the infosphere, and the exhausting acclivity of trying to find a meaningful home within it, or just somewhere vaguely affordable to live. Incisive, funny, sad and true: I felt every thought of it.

—— JACK UNDERWOOD

A meticulous portrait of a hostile present drawn from a year spent haunting others' houses, Hamya's prose is both spectral and steeped in contemporary reality.

—— OLIVIA SUDJIC

Hamya is razor-sharp on what it means for a young woman to try and make their way in a world delineated by privilege, (still) dominated by those with the 'right' connections.

—— The Bookseller *Editor's Choice*

This incisive, acerbic meditation on possession, politics and privilege is among the summer's hottest debuts.

—— Madeleine Feeny , Culture Whisper

Three Rooms is one of the most candid and subtle explorations of class by an English novelist in recent years. Hamya writes with a Cuskian pellucidity, but confronts capital and the precariat in a way Cusk never does, in its many smudgy, insidious forms. This is a novel about bumping against the walls of the life you've be told to build and finding the doors locked.

—— Stephanie Sy-Quia , Times Literary Supplement

A brave, experimental debut... Jo Hamya possesses a powerful and powerfully enquiring intellect.

—— Michael Donkor , i

Fascinating and insightful...a profound, well-written and relatable novel that expertly captures the mood of a generation.

—— Molly Hunter , UK Press Syndication

[With] sharpness of observation... Hamya cherishes detail... [and] gives a vivid and persuasive picture of life as lived by highly intelligent well-educated young people today... Jo Hamya is a very talented writer.

—— Allan Massie , Scotsman

A vital look at the precarity felt by many millennials.

—— Jessie Thompson , Evening Standard

A prismatic portrait of British life and millennial angst emerges, with echoes of Zadie Smith and Sally Rooney, but the presiding spirit of the novel is Virginia Woolf... Scintillating prose and sly social observation make this novel a tart pleasure.

—— Kirkus Review

A furious encapsulation of Generation Rent.

—— Olivia Laing , New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

From the first paragraph, I was hooked. Tension drips through every scene and Hamya depicts London so well.

—— Courttia Newland , Observer, *Books of the Year*

With many of its poems famous in wider culture, it delivers an emotional intensity no less captivating for being familiar

—— Guardian, *Books of the Year*

This collection is a gut-punching series of poems that has haunted me ever since I first read it. I am so excited to see what Warsan Shire does next

—— Student Newspaper

[A] stunning debut collection... her words speak to women's experiences worldwide

—— Bernadine Evaristo, author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER , Guardian

Deft and graceful, French Braid is utterly convincing. Fifty-eight years since she published her first novel, Tyler continues to capture life's joys, contradictions and ordinary heartbreaks with humour and precision

—— Sarah Collins , Prospect

Tyler pulls off the rare feat of presenting her characters both as they see themselves and as others see them

—— Scotsman, *Summer Reads of 2022*

A warm-hearted exploration of the foibles and dynamics of family life

—— The Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*

read her for the eccentric characters, the pitch-perfect dialogue, the humour and the tiny ordinary moments so exquisitely described they bring tears to your eyes

—— Liane Moriarty , Irish Daily Mail

A warm-hearted exploration of the foibles and dynamics of family life

—— The Times, *Books of the Year*

Tyler is a superb observer of family life... Heartbreak is deftly layered over a vibrant portrayal of the city, its codes and nuances

—— Lady, *Books of the Year*

Anne Tyler is a wonderful storyteller and French Braid is another classic... Funny but hearthbreaking, too. I loved every single page

—— Good Housekeeping, *Books of the Year*

Anne Tyler's genius lies in her ability to make this unremarkable family so enthralling

—— Sunday Express

Tyler is a genius at telling big stories with small details and this is an engrossing, fascinating family portrait

—— UK Press Syndication

Gentle and comforting, but with a hidden core of desperate, cloying sadness, and is vintage Tyler

—— Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2023*

An astute, well-observed and compulsively readable saga

—— Daily Mirror

I adore her [Tyler] books. She’s written 24 novels and I’ve read every single one. She’s 81 and yet French Braid, her latest, is one of her very best

—— Jacqueline Wilson , Sunday Times
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