best comfort books

[poppy34]

Votes for

Gerogette heyer -any but esp grand sophy
Jilly cooper (rivals and polo being particular favourites)
Katharine -anya seton
gone with the wind - margaret mitchell
the pursuit of love - nancy mitford
the course of honour- lindsey davis

any other ideas (as always open to more esp in run up to summer holidays)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 'Sunset Song' or indeed the whole Scots Quair trilogy. That's my most read over the past (ahem!) 30 something years.

I also like to dip in and out of 'True Tales of American Life' edited by Paul Auster. Heartwarming, heartbreaking, amazing, poignant, funny...everything's there. Highly recommended.

middlemarch, and any bill bryson

A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute

Also agree about GWTW & Cold Comfort Farm. I also really like Antonia Fraser & Alison Weir's historical ios - esp the 6 wives of Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots & Elizabeth I. Love to re-read and re-absorb.

Jane Austen - all of them. I re-read them every year at least once.

Famous Five books! After a really busy day at work I love to lie in the bath with lavender oil, a candle and The Fab Five!

Nigella Lawson - especially "Feast" but any will do.

Children's books like "Ballet Shoes", "Goodnight Mr Tom" etc but especially "Tom's Midnight Garden".

Bill Bryson - especially "A Walk In The Woods"- I love reading about grizzly attacks and hyperthermia whilst relaxing with a hot chocolate!

The Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey
The Lord Peter Whimsey ones that have Harriet in them
The Chalet School

Definitely the Lord Peter Wimsey ones with Harriet in - especially the one where they get married (Busman's Honeymoon) and of ocurse there's a dead body in their honeymoon cottage. And Gaudy Night where she finally agrees to marry him.

The L Shaped Room trilogy - Lynne Reid Banks
Little House on the Prairie books
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Any of the stories with the Glass family in by J D Salinger
And my ultimate comfort book, I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith - have read it about a zillion times