I have just blued £30 on Nicola bloody Marlow

morningtoncrescent62... Masha? Really? That was one of my favourite books when I was at school and I thought it had sunk without trace, apart from the occasional copy costing hundreds of pounds. Oh wow , must go and search for it instantly . And even again, though I guess I may have missed the boat and all available copies will be too expensive again!

Thank you Miranda and Rusty

Just ordered mine.

Marlows and the Traitor due out in 10 days time -£19
www.ggbp.co.uk/forthcoming-books/

£30 for Nicola Marlow pales into insignificance besides the £125 I paid for Masha a few years back, thinking it would only ever go up and up in price and I knew I would always want it. About six months later, one of the specialist publishers (not GGBP but another one) published it for a fraction of that. Ah well.

Ha ha! This thread has cheered me up, yes have certainly spent more money than I can afford on AF books, the latest being The Thuggery Affair - reasonable hb off ebay, - 24 hours after giving birth. Well I could always blame the hormones but I wanted to say 'well done' to myself (any excuse!) It was more than I would have normally, or should have, spent but as with all my other AF purchases I cannot regret it!

GGBP are reprinting them all :)

I've never been able to afford Run Away Home.
I console myself that it's something to look forward to one day.

I've got two End of Term if anyone's desperate for a scruffy paperback.

I need to find my copy of Cricket term. Didn't realise they were collectors items now.
I paid a fair amount to complete my trebizon set though!

Nicola Marlow is def worth £30...

I think Karen is horrible in TRMF. She wants Edwin (and I have my suspicions about her discovering she wasn't quite as academic and intelligent as she thought and seeing marriage as another option) and she doesn't give a damn about anyone else.
She brings Chas, Rose and Fob to a new situation with no thought about what's best for them. Her treatment of the Tranters is horrible - I'm always amazed at Mrs Marlow's complicity in this.
I think Karen acts like a spoilt child

Rusty, it was that I was thinking about.

I dislike Karen but there is one episode (might be in Cricket term?) where I warm to her when Nicola has taken the washing to the farmhouse and she is talking about her pudding disasters. I think it is the scene where Chas coins the term Methren.

She wasn't that great in TRF either though, was she? Pushing Mrs Tranter out of the farmhouse before her husband was cold in his grave...

Damn. It was RAH where k is so awful. I wrote before I checked.

Have just realised what it would cost if I were to ask for the Elizabethan ones for Christmas.

I used to like Karen but she behaves APPALLINGLY in TRF. Even though I see the point if the lacrimae rerum.

I like Rowan when she says how boring being a farmer is. I am irritated by the so obvious antithesis between the twins.

But I love the minor characters. Patrick's wonderful parents, with his mother not prepared to lie about her attitude to Vatican ll, that it's a relief she no longer has to turn down dinner parties on Fridays. Miranda, so cleverly drawn. Drippy Esther. Jan and her boring future. The dreadful Lois. The scary murderous paedophile, written a long time before our current concerns. The scary MFH.

I do feel The father is a bit too like the father in Swallows and Amazons, but then many naval fathers fall into type.

£30 on Antonia Forest is money well spent!
I have got the set but would definitely have spent that to get Falconers Lure when I was missing it - in fact I'd prob still pay to get the hardback version I remember reading at school!
Am I the only person who likes Karen? Not that she didn't make some truly bad choices, but still...And Rowan and Giles irritate me, they are just so, well, Right all the time

Where would you put Peter?

I love the fact that Forest was so unflinching in the way she portrayed the main characters. Karen truly was a monstrously selfish bitch.

Normally families stay in the same house (altho not the Patil twins). The family was iconoclastic enough for Gryffindor, altho that's the easy choice. Ann is total Hufflepuff and possibly Nicola Ravenclaw. Ginty and Lawrie I'd stuff in Slytherin as they're such arses. Rowan is the true Gryffindor of the family (and maybe Giles).

But which house would they be in ? Would you separate the twins?

I can't bear Karen. Not after what she did in The Ready Made Family. Self deluding bitch.

The Marlows at Hogwarts. What a fantastic idea.

I stupidly gave all mine away when depressed one year. DH has bought almost all of them for me. But I haven't read the Elizabethan one.

My faves are Peter ' s room and the one about the Christmas Carol service. Though cricket term's cricket match us almost on a par with the Wimsey equivalent and, as I gave said on MN before, I adore the sanctimonious booting of Patrick by his school.

It's money well spent OP. I love the Marlowe books. I only discovered them last year but have bought the four school stories since then, the Sally Haywood fan fic one and my sister got me Falcon's Lure for Christmas.

'In my less sane moments Ive even considered paying someone to type them out so I can covert them to pdf files and upload them to my kindle!'

In those moments on a rainy Monday when I fantasise about winning the lottery/getting a massive book deal, I've thought about paying the best of the AF fanfic writers massive grants so they can churn out updates, daily...

Congrats, OP! Always nice to see another AF fan here - hope you manage to get the other books you want.

To OP and everyone else who are AF fans , have you seen trennels.livejournal.com? A discussion site for all things Marlow, by a fabulously erudite and smart lot who have just finished a readthrough of all the Marlow books. A few members have pdf copies of Peter's Room and The Marlows and the Traitor which they can send.

(Also, I know it sounds obvious, but ask at your local library if they have any AF. My local borough didn't, but their service allows me to check other libraries in surrounding counties under the SELMS search - and thus it was that I finally got my mitts on a copy of Run Away Home two weeks ago. It was the only AF I hadn't read, and for a few mad minutes after wine I did consider spending my entire £250 Amazon birthday voucher on a copy.)

Also - AF fanfiction is first-class. I like fanfic generally as A Thing even if badly written, but seriously, there are many talented writers who write just like AF and who have published drabbles, short stories, novellas and full-length novels, including Ginty running away to Ireland and the Marlows at Hogwarts - wondrous for AF fans craving more. It's all collated here: lauracanning.net/antonia-forest-fanfiction-a-readers-guide.html