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Original poster

Please can you help me find this book?

31 replies

PinkysEars · 02/09/2019 19:06

I'm driving myself mad with frustration because I can't remember a book/author. Please can you help me?

It's about a woman who moves to a small English village (possibly because her marriage is over, not sure about that bit) and starts to do up a house. She finds some sort of household book that is contemporaneous with the house and follows a few of the instructions. I don't remember many examples, but one is definitely making tallow dips.

To start with the villagers are quite interested in her "finds" but then she creates a ruckus/offends them by making them feel as though she's actually patronising them.

I read a few books by this woman and liked them all, but I'm damned if I can remember her name.

Please help me: I've googled the hell out of it and I'm getting nowhere.

OP posts:
Original poster
PinkysEars · 02/09/2019 19:51

You are kind! Thank you, but that's not it.

Definitely a female author and I'm fairly sure also British. Dammit I can even see the colour of the cover. I have to hope that I'll wake up with a start at 3am having suddenly remembered.

Thank you so much for trying to put me out of my misery. There's something particularly irksome about a title/author that refuse to be pinned down.

OP posts:
BikeRunSki · 02/09/2019 19:43

I did a search on keywords “tallow” and “old house” on the ABE Books bookfinder, which suggested The Turnpike House.

Original poster
PinkysEars · 02/09/2019 19:39

It will be 1990s.

It has a bit of a Penelope Fitzgerald feeling (in my head...) but it isn't her.

Thank you for answering me by the way: really appreciate it.

OP posts:
64sNewName · 02/09/2019 19:35

Any idea when it was written - just by approximate decade?

Original poster
PinkysEars · 02/09/2019 19:21

More literary I think, definitely not "women's fiction".

There may have been another one by the same writer, which was about a woman author who didn't go on her own book launch/tour, instead sending someone else who looked the part. That's an even dimmer memory and may be an entirely different author. [I appreciate that's not terribly helpful.]

OP posts:
64sNewName · 02/09/2019 19:15

No idea, sorry, but I’m curious about it now.

What sort of genre/cover - was it a commercial fiction sort of book, what they call “women’s fiction”? Or more literary?