"Rather dated"

I've also just read the Ella Palmer trilogy by Stan Barstow, hard to obtain as out of print but set in WW2.

Stan Barstow is such a good writer and I loved the Vic Brown novels even though he was a bit of an arse at times

Susan Howatch is another good author and some of her books are set in the 70s or through different time periods of the 20th century like the Starbridge novels

Just thinking about Penelope Lively, I'd really recommend According to Mark - it's one of those books that doesn't do anything in particular but is just incredibly, deeply, satisfying. I find it quite redolent of the 80s but there's nothing specific about that, just that it's set then, and it's surprising how it brings that time back for me, even though nobody in the book has much in common with me. Just small things perhaps - how people get in touch with each other, what they do for fun, their assumptions and what they do when they're pushing their own boundaries. I'm not really selling it but I do love it.

Here it is! I didn't want to start a thread with the word 'adult' in the title late at night in case it attracted the wrong kind of attention!😃

www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4610402-what-was-the-first-adult-novelbook-you-read-and-how-old-were-you

Get it going then!

I came on to recommend Mary Stewart too, fabulous escapist books which l first read in my teens and still return to now, 55 years later.

Margaret Drabble’s “A Summer Bird Cage” was the first book I read (other than chrildren’s books, of course).

That would make a brilliant thread - 'What was the first adult novel you ever read?'

Margaret Drabble’s “A Summer Bird Cage” was the first book I read (other than chrildren’s books, of course). It is about two middle-class sisters in the 1960s, and their aspirations. One is newly graduated from Oxford, and one is marrying a grim but wealthy man.

I have a great copy of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ with the cover tag-line: “Makes ‘Room at the Top’ look like a vicarage tea party” 😺

My DF was a university lecturer and he used to collect paperbacks of DH Lawrence novels with raunchy covers and suggestive strap lines: I can’t help thinking a lot of readers must have been disappointed (even ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is mostly a rather serious post-WW1 state-of-the-nation novel, IMHO).

Good thought @Antarcticant

I don't think anyone has mentioned Iris Murdoch yet - very strong on rather dated middle class lives. I would particularly recommend 'The Sandcastle' 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat' and 'An Accidental Man' for rather dated everyday life. I like almost all her books, but some are more weird and wonderful than reasonably ordinary people.

I know @tobee , the covers are very soft focus “erotic”! She’s a brilliant writer though. Leaf In the wind is terrific.

Ooh I just looked up Nan Maynard on Amazon. They seem to be second hand copies mostly and sone have rather raunchy covers

Anything by Mary Stewart, who is a cracking writer.

jilly Coopers early books, all with a girls name, eg Imogen

Usually 'rather dated' is code for racism / sexism / homophobia in my experience. That's how interpret this too.

@JaninaDuszejko i was reading a book and found it was set in and referred to the Spanish flu period in the US. Eerily reflective of covid. It’s called As Bright as Heaven and is by Susan Meissner.

Love this thread! I love Elizabeth Taylor which are real slices of life from the 50s/60s. And has anyone read Nan Maynard? I’ve not met anyone IRL who’s even heard of her.

Just to add I love the period references but also find fascinating the contrast in, what I suppose you'd call, society attitudes between then & now.

Love a dated book!

Have now bought, and have just begun reading, Road to Litchfield. Some parallels as have an elderly father who has just been diagnosed with dementia.

Stan Barstow for 60’s
best known for the Vic Brown trilogy

so I have decided to believe Adrian Mole is alive and well and that he's happier than he was a few years ago

I decided he definitely found happiness with the disillusioned Pandora at long last, and responded to his cancer treatment. It was so frustrating that all the previous books left him on a 'happy ever after' which was then unpicked by the time the following book started.

On Adrian Mole, he's 15 months older than me - the end of her sadly last novel left him with prostrate cancer hopefully successfully treated - that's not really a spoiler given the title of the book, and a sweet will they won't they ending, so I have decided to believe Adrian Mole is alive and well and that he's happier than he was a few years ago. So although he's from a slightly different background, and didn't get to higher education (unlike his girlfriend from a posher background, apparently cleverer though Adrian is naive and needing a break, rather than supposedly thick - and I'm sure some readers just think he's stupid).

Sue Townsend was a communist of sorts, and I'm sure she would have been delighted by Jeremy Corbyn and appalled by the current state of affairs, but I do wonder how her characters would have reacted. His first love Pandora Braithwaite was a former MP by the end (elected 1997, but I don't remember whether she lost her seat or stood down, I don't believe she was caught fiddling her expenses). I think she was very disillusioned with Tony Blair (who Townsend never had any illusions in), as was Adrian for rather different reasons. Adrian has an adult son from a previous relationship who joined the army to get a job with prospects just in time to be sent to Iraq, and in one book in the series diary entries are accompanied by letters from the war zone.

Period detail, period attitudes, historical source, sometimes uncomfortable but often interesting.

I love Penelope lively, and would recommend all the others mentioned too, especially Lynn Reid Banks and Margaret Drabble. Early Elizabeth Jane Howard books could fit well in the mix, especially The Long View, Anita Brookner, and Muriel Spark, for a slightly earlier period.

I really like reading books published in an earlier era and seeing the period references. Yes, the characters may have different perceptions. In the 1970s I read quite a lot of Penelope Lively's books for kids my age and actually slightly older, ditto NIna Bawden and others. I'm a decade baby, meaning that I was a child of the 1970s, a teenager in the 1980s, a 20 something in the 1990s, except for a few months, as I was born in 1969 not 1970s. In my teens I moved on to reading lots of 1960s and 1970s novels, alongside older books.

I also read a lot of historical fiction but set in the recent past. A few months ago I read the first two or three novels in the Charles Paris amateur sleuth series by Simon Brett. I was actually quite surprised to realise that first 3 books were published in the 1970s, each set a couple of years before. Brett made the mistake of making his character a 47 year old man at the start. There are now at least 20 books in the series, some published only a few years ago, and if Parris had continued to age in real time, he would of course be a bit close to 100. Which from a radio dramatisation of #18 I heard, Bret t must have decided at some point to either i stop mentioning what year it is, as he did in his early series books, or to keep Parris as a permanently middle aged character (very common in long running series).

I love "dated" books for period references as they're real not imagined - the attitudes may not have worn well but you can , learn all kinds of things from reading contemporary fiction of the 50s or 60s. I collect Virago Modern Classics, many themselves now a bit of history. And books from smaller imprints like Persephone and the wonderfully named Furrowed Middlebrow.