The Gift of a Home

by Beverley Nichols

The following three titles: Down the Garden Path, A Thatched Roof and A Village in a Valley form the Allways trilogy about Nichols's Tudor cottage in Glatton, Cambridgeshire. The Gift of a Garden, a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0491007035
• ISBN13: 9780491007030
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: W.H. Allen
• Length: 395 Pages

Customer Reviews

Laughter and Home Remodeling in Post-war Britian

Mr. Nichols tells the story of his rescue of Merry Hall a neglected, badly renovated house and garden. His prose is the prose of a bygone era, elegant and genteel. The action of the book is centered around the renovation of the old house and the characters he runs into during that time. Mr. Nichols leaves nothing out. He even tells of his humorous house hunting run-ins with real estate agents. There is Oldfield, a cantankerous old gardener, to humor outside the house and Gaskin, an uppity butler, to humor inside the house. Now add to this a couple of nosy, meddling, old spinsters, Marius who wanders in and out with bits of educated trivia, and a rich guy named Bob who constantly prophesies disaster. Things are made even more interesting by the fact that money is tight and building materials, even recycled ones, are hard to get. How I wish this book could be made into a movie!