INTRODUCED BY LOUIS DE BERNIERES

‘I’m a huge fan of Barbara Pym’ RICHARD OSMAN

‘I’d sooner read a new Barbara Pym than a new Jane Austen’ PHILIP LARKIN

Formidable Miss Doggett fills her life by giving tea parties for young academics and acting as watchdog for the morals of North Oxford. Anthea, her great-niece, is in love with a dashing undergraduate with political ambitions. Of this, Miss Doggett thoroughly approves. However, Anthea’s father, an Oxford don, is carrying on in the most unseemly fashion with a student - they have been spotted together at the British museum! But the only liaison Miss Doggett isn’t aware of is taking place under her very own roof: the lodger has proposed to her paid companion Miss Morrow. She wouldn’t approve of that at all.

‘Brilliant, hilarious and so very, very English’ DAILY MAIL

‘My favourite writer … I pick up her books with joy’ JILLY COOPER