The latest addition to my website is Rosemary Tonks‘ The Halt during the Chase. This novel wittily tells the story of a few eccentric characters in the London suburb of Hampstead in 1979. Our heroine/narrator is the thirty-one year old Sophie who has a decidedly ambiguous relationship with both her widowed mother and her not-quite fiancé, Philip. He is intelligent and works for the Treasury but is a self-centred bore. She thinks she loves him but also has her doubts. When a clairvoyant advises her that he is not the one for her, she heads off to Normandy for a long stay. However what makes this book is not just Sophie and her mother and Sophie and Philip but the other eccentric characters that live near Sophie’s mother, not least of which is a peripatetic yellow Chesterfield sofa. Not great literature but very amusing and confirms that the British are all a bit weird, but generally in a nice way.