Great gags, hope and happy endings: books to cheer everyone up

From a wartime romance to a comedy of cooking errors … Amanda Craig recommends books that lift the spirits

With the second lockdown upon us, we have never been more in need of books to cheer and charm. As both reader and writer, I have waged a lifelong battle against the kind of novel that makes you feel worse at its end than you did when you started it. Happy endings are not always trite: consider how Tolstoy balances Anna Karenina’s suicide with the happy marriage of Levin and Kitty.

PG Wodehouse’s comedies, set in an idealised milieu of butlers, country houses and chorus girls, are a balm for all seasons. The work of Eva Ibbotson, which shares many of the same features, should be far better known. As well as great children’s stories, such as Journey to the River Sea, she wrote six adult novels that are sophisticated, brilliantly plotted and gloriously funny. The Morning Gift concerns a secret marriage of convenience between a Jewish academic’s daughter and an aristocratic visiting British professor, which enables our heroine to escape Nazi Vienna. Of course, they fall in love but can’t admit it. When they are plunged into wartime London, with its snobberies and privations, the plot is hilarious and filmic. A Jewish refugee herself, Ibbotson underpins her romantic comedies with an apprehension of evil, which gives their comforts more depth than most.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2K3G5AS