Hi! I would like to ask, if you would be so kind, to suggest me books about what the title says. Any genre is fine! I’ve read about 50 books from Agatha Christie and I kinda fell in love with the whole settings (hope this is the word). Also, I’m fan of HIMYM, where in the show they portrayed TV series about upper English class estate, that’s where I got the idea to read more.
Thank you very much for your recommendations!
PS: sorry for my grammar mistakes, English is not my first language.
by Afraid_Carob_2611
12 Comments
Remains of the Day
Any specific era? There’s Ruth Goodman’s books on Tudor and Elizabethan life, which are a lot of fun.
For Victorian and Edwardian eras, I liked:
“Servants” by Lucy Lethbridge
“To Marry an English Lord” by Gail McColl and Carol Wallace
“Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey” and “Lady Catherine, the Earl” and the Real Downton Abbey” by the Countess of Carnarvon
“The Mitford Girls” by Mary S. Lovell
“The Riviera Set” by Mary S. Lovell
I second the recommendation for The Remains of the Day. For me, Kazuo Ishiguro evokes England better than any other writer.
For that kind of old fashioned, aristocratic setting that you seem to be looking for, I’d try older authors like EM Forster, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.
For newer works, try Kate Atkinson and the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn.
I think you need Dorothy L Sayers. Detective fiction similar to Agatha Christie but her detective is a lord and his assistant is his manservant. Set in the twenties and thirties. They’re beautifully written and wonderfully plotted. You will love them.
Jane Austen
Galsworthy
Thackery
Wodehouse
Country House Society: The Private Lives of England’s Upper Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn
Bridgehead Revisited
Julian Fellowes of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey fame has written some books about the British upper class.
+1 for The Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy Sayers which are about the brother of a Duke solving mysteries in 1920s and 1930s Britain.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
I just finished the book The Infamous Gilbert’s, about an aristocratic family after WWII to the present.
It’s an unusual book in the way it’s told – the reader is invited to go on a tour of the house and property by a friend of the family. The last member of the family living in the house died, and the house is going to be remodeled into a resort.
As you go through the house with the neighbor, he shares things about different rooms – this a an award one of the children got, this is the big teapot the cook used everyday- and gradually fills in pieces of the family history. And some you have to figure out yourself.
I think this is a book you’ll either hate because it seems slow and nothing really seems to happen or you’ll love the cozy feel of someone spilling the tea while you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle. I thought it was beautifully written.
Anthony Powell wrote a 12-volume novel series about that very subject, A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME.
The series of Cazalet novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard might fit your bill – they follow members of an upper middle class family from WW2 to the present day. Apparently the novels are among Queen Camilla’s favourite books.
Wickwythe Hall