Tag: stella gibbons

December pick: Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

Our literary pick for the month of December for Kat’s Books & Wine Club comes from an old Instagram post of Kat’s. It’s the aptly themed Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.

Available for the first time since its original publication more than fifty years ago, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is a charming collection whose hilarious title story features Christmas dinner with the Starkadders before Flora’s arrival. With Adam playing Santa while draped in Mrs. Starkadders’s shawls, the family shares their traditional “Christmas pudding”-a mélange containing random objects of doom foretelling the coming year: a coffin nail for death, a bad sixpence for financial ruin, and a menthol cone to indicate that the lucky recipient will go “blind wi’ headache.” These lively tales will delight anyone who loves Stella Gibbons and her signature wit.

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June pick: Nightingale Wood

This month’s summery pick for Kat’s Books & Wine Club is Nightingale Wood by English author Stella Gibbons, a book which Kat shared on her Instagram back in February 2016.

Life is not quite a fairytale for poor Viola. Left penniless, the young widow is forced to live with her late husband’s family in a joyless old house. There’s Mr Wither, a tyrannical old miser, Mrs Wither, who thinks Viola is just a common shop girl, and two unlovely sisters-in-law, one of whom is in love with the chauffeur. 

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