Owing a debt to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment is an elegant and witty comedy of manners from an acclaimed author who Philip Larkin called ‘the most underrated novelist of the century’.

‘I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym’ – Richard Osman, author of The Thursday Murder Club

‘The day comes in the life of every single man living alone when he must give a dinner party.’

The parish of St Basil, on the fringes of North Kensington, is all of a flutter due to the arrival of Rupert Stonebird, a most eligible bachelor, in the neighbourhood. The local matchmakers are sure he will make a suitable husband for the vicar’s wife’s sister, Penny, or perhaps for local librarian Ianthe Broome?

But Ianthe is in danger of forming a most unsuitable attachment to her new library assistant, John, a man of questionable background with not a penny to his name . . .

‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure’ – Jilly Cooper, author of The Rutshire Chronicles

The most underrated novelist of the century . . . The subtlest of her books – the sparkle on first acquaintance has been succeeded by the deeper brilliance of established art -- Philip Larkin
I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym * Richard Osman, Author of The Thursday Murder Club *
[Pym] makes me smile, laugh out loud, consider my own foibles and fantasies, and, above all, suffer real regret when I reach the final page. Of how many authors can you honestly say that? -- Mavis Cheek
A splendid, humorous writer -- John Betjeman
Barbara Pym has a sharp eye for the exact nuances of social behaviour * The Times *
The wit and style of a twentieth-century Jane Austen * Harpers & Queen *
Barbara Pym’s unpretentious, subtle, accomplished novels are for me the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years . . . Spectacular * The Sunday Times *

Very funny and keenly observant of the ridiculous as well as the pathetic in humanity

Barbara Pym (1913–1980) was a British novelist best known for her series of satirical novels on English middle-class society. A graduate of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, Pym published the first of her nine novels, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950, followed by five more books. Despite this early success and continuing popularity, Pym went unpublished from 1963 to 1977. Her work was rediscovered after a famous article in the Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated Pym as the most underrated writer of the century. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize.