For thirty-five years, two women frighten each other through the fading twilight of the last century, their existence an unacknowledged tragedy of manners. Confusing their duty to one another for the feelings they’re too busy to mention, their desire for modest social success ends by asphyxiating whatever lies within its grasp. From the art galleries of Manhattan Island to the pubs of the North Yorkshire Moors, Nature and Necessity is a wild reimagining of the nineteenth-century realist novel, a story of siblings battling for survival and supremacy, a war story without armies, and a warning that even the most promising and prosperous of lives can be crushed by the fear of uttering the confession: I love you.

This is a wonderfully in-depth journey into the lives of a remarkable family, dark, deep, funny and, above all, likeable. I’m missing Petula and her children already. - Pat Mills, creator of 2000AD. Further endorsements from Nail Griffiths, author of Grits, and Jonathan Meades, author of An Encyclopedia of Myself.