One fine day
Mollie Panter-Downes was a great writer with a style as smooth as silk. She had a wide following for her New Yorker columns, but I encountered her by accident while browsing the fiction shelves in my university library. At first, nothing much happens in One Fine Day, which is set in England in 1947. And then, it seems to me, everything happens. I found myself thinking: this is life, as viewed from a hilltop. I've read the book multiple times, and I still can't see how she does it. I bought a copy on Amazon, a first edition. It is one of my favourite books: gentle, lucid, surprising, precisely constructed. From Wikipedia: "Mary Patricia "Mollie" Panter-Downes (25 August 1906--22 January 1997) was a novelist and newspaper columnist for The New Yorker. Aged sixteen, she wrote The Shoreless Sea which became a bestseller; eight editions were published in 1923 and 1924, and the book was serialised in The Daily Mirror. Her second novel The Chase was published in 1925. After her marriage to Aubrey Robinson in 1927, the couple moved to Surrey, and in 1938 Panter-Downes began writing for the New Yorker, first a series of short stories, and from September 1939, a column entitled Letter from London, which she wrote until 1984. The collected columns were later published as Letters from England (1940) and London War Notes (1972)."