‘One Fine Day’ by Mollie Panter-Downes ****
I have, shamefully, been meaning to read Mollie Panter-Downes’ novel, One Fine Day, for over a decade. I have read and very much enjoyed a lot of her other work, so I’ve no excuse, really, as to why it took me so long to pick up a copy of her final, and most well-known, novel.
The copy I read – Virago Modern Classic number 195 – was introduced by the founder of Persephone books, Nicola Beauman, and has been described variously as ‘Searingly accurate yet poignantly subtle’ (The Guardian), and ‘As profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker’ (The Independent). Beauman writes: ‘… this is not a backward-looking novel… [It] looks forward optimistically to the future. It does so from a resolutely unpolitical, unideological stance, for this is a novel about an ordinary, middle-class woman with the same ordinary preoccupations as thousands of her contemporaries.’
Beauman goes on to recap a succinct and rather fascinating biography of Panter-Downes, who saw herself primarily as a journalist, but wrote rather a number of fictional pieces too. Her first novel, The Shoreless Sea, was published in 1923, when Panter-Downes was astonishingly just 17 years old. During the Second World War, Panter-Downes also wrote a long series of ‘Letters from London’ for The New Yorker, which were first published in 1939, and backdated to the initial day of the war, September the 3rd. The weekly letter was delivered to her local station by Panter-Downes herself, and then sent by train to London; this continued throughout the war, and Beauman notes that ‘the copy was only lost on one occasion’. I have read the Persephone edition of these letters, an excellent and revealing collection, and such an important precis on what it was like to live through the Second World War on the Home Front.
First published in 1947, One Fine Day takes place on a single hot summer day in 1946, in the small village of Wealding, which lies between Surrey and Sussex, where Panter-Downes spent a lot of her own life. Wealding is described as ‘the perfect village in aspic, at the sight of which motorists applied their brakes, artists happily set up easels, cyclists dismounted and purchased picture postcards at the post office to send to their little nieces…’. Never does Panter-Downes make village life feel idyllic; one gets the sense from the very beginning of the novel that there is always something sinister lurking beneath the beautiful views.
Married couple Laura and Stephen Marshall, who live with their 10-year-old daughter, Victoria, have been reunited after years apart, due to the Second World War, and they quickly find that ‘their marriage, too, has been irrevocably altered by the war’. The blurb enticingly describes the way in which Panter-Downes fashioned her diurnal novel: ‘Hour by hour, as the glorious weather holds, the rhythms of ordinary life begin to falter – and as evening falls, something will have changed forever…’.
One of the real strengths of Panter-Downes’ writing for me are her wonderful descriptions, which capture ordinary moments with a great deal of beauty: ‘What a morning! Later it would be very hot, but now the dew frosted the grey spikes of the pinks, the double syringa hung like a delicious white cloud in the pure air. The cat sat with her feet close together on the unmown grass, and suddenly, sticking out a stiff back leg, ran her mouth up and down as though playing a passage on a flute.’ Of the day’s unrelenting heat, she writes later: ‘The midday heat was rising to a head, like milk to the boil, singing in a clotted hum of bees, of crickets among the sorrel and daisies, of gnats dancing above the cresses tugged all one way by the trickle of water running under the hedge.’
I love the way in which Panter-Downes captures glimpses, and how she sees certain characters through the lens of another’s eyes. In her school playground, for instance, Victoria and her friend, Mouse, see Laura pass outside: ‘How strange, thought Victoria in a flash of calm objectivity, as though she had never seen her before. There goes my mother. How tall she was! She had a strangeness, seen in the Bridbury street but not knowing she was seen… there goes my mother, a very tall woman in a striped cotton frock.’
During the war, the family home had been filled with various guests, and some staff; now, it is silent. On this single day in August, Stephen is working in London, and Victoria is out at various engagements; Laura remains at home: ‘Now, said the house to Laura, we are alone together. Now I am yours again.’ I found the constant contrast which Panter-Downes provided between life now and life before, or during, the war, and how it played out in the same spaces, fascinating; it is quite a simple literary device, but wonderfully contemplative, and so well handled. When she is in a very long line at a shop in town, for example, Laura thinks: ‘The war is over, Stephen was not killed, we could still live like gods, but he sits in his hot office, and here I stand. Is there any sense to it?’
One Fine Day is a beautiful and immersive novel, written by a highly perceptive author. Throughout, Panter-Downes includes a lot of important social commentary about how things changed following the Second World War: the difficulty of keeping large estates in the family due to monetary constraints, the almost impossible search for household staff, the need to eat foodstuffs which would not be a first choice. Echoes of the war run through the novel, from the rationing and coupons which were still in place, to the village’s lost men, killed in the conflict.
I wish to spoil nothing, but I found the ending of One Fine Day rather an unexpected delight, which I feel will stay with me for a long time to come.
Saturday Song: ‘It’s OK’ by Edith Whiskers
Five Underrated Novels (Based Solely on the Fact I Don’t Hear People Speak About Them)
I have always been drawn to unusual titles and less popular novels. With that in mind, just as it says in the title of this post, I wanted to highlight five titles which I very much enjoyed, but haven’t read a single review of.
Fight Night by Miriam Toews
‘When Swiv is temporarily kicked out of school, her grandma gives her an assignment to write a letter to her absent father. Swiv’s assignment to Grandma is to write a letter to Gord, her unborn grandchild and Swiv’s brother or sister. “You are a small thing,” Grandma writes to Gord, “but you must learn to fight.” Grandma has been fighting all her life: from her upbringing in a strictly religious community, ruled over by the odious Will Braun, she has fought the people who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit; she has fought to protect her family, and she has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. Swiv’s mother, too, is fighting “on every front,” as Grandma puts it, “Internally. Externally.”
Fight Night is a love letter to the mothers and grandmothers who have raised us, and to all the women who know what it costs to live in this world, but who are still finding a way—painfully, ferociously—to live on their own terms.’
The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
‘Young mother Daphne flees her sedate life in San Francisco for the high desert, her toddler Honey in tow. Her Turkish husband has been unable to return to the United States – a ‘click-of-the-mouse error’ – and Daphne is on the verge of a breakdown. She hopes a stay in her family’s unused mobile home will bring quiet, and clarity. But clarity proves elusive, as Daphne’s dream of escape collides with the reality of a deeply divided world.
Keenly observed, bristling with humour, The Golden State is a gorgeous debut about class, a fractured America and, above all, motherhood: its voracious worry, frequent tedium and enthralling, wondrous love.’
The Whispers by Ashley Audrain
‘A propulsive page-turner about four families whose lives are changed when the unthinkable happens—and what is lost when we give in to our own worst impulses.
On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a catered barbecue as the summer winds down; drinks continue late into the night.
Everything is fabulous until the picture-perfect hostess explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then, his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where she refuses to speak to anyone, and his life hangs in the balance.
What happens next, over the course of a tense three days, as each of these women grapple with what led to that terrible night?
Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Audrain as a major women’s fiction talent.’
Step in the Dark by Ethel Lina White
‘On what trivialities the big things in life hang.
From the moment when, dining alone in her Brussels hotel, Georgia Yeo, celebrated writer of detective thrillers, opens her cigarette case and the Count comes into her life with the polite offer of a light, she realises that here is fate.
In that moment too begins the strange and inimitable spell of Georgia’s story. It is an enthralling story, of a woman successful in her career, yet timid and hesitant in making a decision which might have a far-reaching effect on her private life.
It’s truly a step in the dark…’
The Sleep Watcher by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
‘When she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of peculiar sleeplessness. Her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their fracturing relationship. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single choice soon changes everything.
‘That summer, my mind separated from my body as completely as an egg cracked from its shell. The splitting began in those hazy days just after exams were done when everything should have been easy.’
Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence.’
Snapshots: Azerbaijan (June 2026)
A wonderful week of adventure in Azerbaijan, spent hiking, exploring, and seeing the sights.
Saturday Song: ‘I Have More Than Enough’ by Searows
‘The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England’ by Juliet Blaxland ***
I hadn’t heard of Juliet Blaxland’s The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England before coming across a copy in a relatively local branch of the Oxfam Bookshop. Its blurb quite captivated me, so I ended up adding it to the sizeable stack of old paperbacks already in my arms.
The Easternmost House was shortlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize in 2019. Its author, who works variously as a cartoonist, illustrator, and architect, lives with her husband in Suffolk. This book spans almost the final year she spent living at the most easterly edge of England, in the hamlet of Easton Bavents, before her cliffside house was demolished due to rapidly-advancing coastal erosion. Each chapter covers a single month, from ‘January: The Beach and the Cliff’ to ‘December: Ring of Bright Water’.
On opening the book, Blaxland tells us she lives in ‘what used to be the easternmost parish of England. The church fell into the sea in 1666, and this house – itself called the Easternmost House – has probably only three summers left before it too is lost to coastal erosion.’ The ‘year of life’ which she writes here spans not twelve calendar months, as is initially posited; rather, Blaxland lets us know her narrative is ‘in fact the distillation of several years of life. There are stories, and beginnings, middles and ends, but not necessarily in that order.’ She writes that The Easternmost House ‘is a portrait of a place that soon will no longer exist. It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone.’ Her own book mirrors a title she took as her point of inspiration: The Outermost House by Henry Boston, which covers a year of his life in Cape Cod during the 1920s.
In her introduction, Blaxland describes her childhood in rural Suffolk during the 1970s, spent largely in isolation, and punctuated by terms at boarding school: ‘I know in reality that for much of the time as a child I was either cold, wet, frightened or mildly unhappy, yet the distilled memory is of one perpetual summer holiday, magically set in the long, hot summer of 1976.’ She then moves forward to her life as an army wife, in her beloved house, which is rented from the owners of a local farmstead, located on the same estate in which she grew up.
The landscape is ever-present, and not always described with the reverence and love one might expect. She is very aware of the danger which lies around her, writing, for instance: ‘This watery landscape looks pretty but it conceals many ways to cast tragedy over the unwary or the over-confident on their summer holidays. The photogenic harbour with its picture-book boats hides its racing tides. The sun-blessed reedbeds hide their disorientating scale and dangerously invisible water-filled dykes. The clifftop path through casual drifts of wild flowers hides lethal cantilevered ledges of sand, unsupported land, hovering over thin air, preparing imminently to crash onto the beach below.’
Blaxland herself is rather prickly, and could easily be a little offensive to particular readers – she is rather scathing about veganism, and what it would do her agriculture-heavy county ‘if all of Suffolk were suddenly to become vegan’, for example – but I did find her intriguing. I liked the way in which she captured the landscape and placed herself against us; she is aware of how small and impermanent individuals are when compared to history, and the Milky Way. She is also admirably keen to imagine what the future will hold when the land she lives on no longer exists as land.
I really enjoyed the descriptive writing here, but I was not as enamoured about the rather manic way the author switches between one topic and the next. Whilst a lot of what she writes about is of interest, particularly with regard to the local landscape and customs, the reading experience felt rather jarring due to the lack of flowing narrative structure.
The Easternmost House was not as captivating as I had hoped, but it does tell an interesting story about a building during a particular moment in time – the end of its long life. The addition of photographs, illustrations, and snippets of poems was a nice touch, as were the lists of in-season fruits, vegetables, and other notable harvests which Blaxland included in each chapter. In these sections, she also marks the distance between the house and the sea, and the shift from the previous month. In January, for example, along with marmalade-making season, Blaxland’s home is 24 metres from the edge of the cliff; in December, this has been reduced to 19.
I must say that The Easternmost House is far less about the house than I expected. Whilst it seems like it will be the focus of the narrative from the outset, it exists only as an afterthought in a lot of the chapters, and is scarcely mentioned in others.
From her present day position whilst writing the book, Blaxland reflects: ‘There is much here that “used to be”, and it seems sad and unromantic that the actual easternmost point in Britain is now an uncelebrated spot in Lowestoft.’ Whilst The Easternmost House will not be added to my favourite memoir list, it does provide a huge amount of food for thought about what will happen to the places we love as climate change and coastal change continue, and how generations in the future may never know of their existence.
Saturday Song: ‘My Little Darling Knows My Nature’ by Kyle Morton
Five Novels to Try
I sadly don’t have much time nowadays to write up reviews, so I feel it’s quite easy for titles to make an impression on me and not feature even momentarily on the blog. To counteract this a little, I have put together a list of five novels which I have read so far in 2026, and haven’t shouted about – even though they all deserve it.
The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes
‘An often hilarious, surprisingly moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter—for fans of A Man Called Ove and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983.
Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”
This wry, propulsive story about a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.’
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
‘When Barbara Van Laar is discovered missing from her summer camp bunk one morning in August 1975, it triggers a panicked, terrified search. Losing a camper is a horrific tragedy under any circumstances, but Barbara isn’t just any camper; she’s the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp — as well as the opulent nearby estate and most of the land in sight. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared in this region: Barbara’s older brother also went missing fourteen years ago, never to be found. How could this have happened yet again?
Out of this gripping beginning, Liz Moore weaves a richly textured drama, both emotionally nuanced and propelled by a double-barreled mystery. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded drama brings readers into the hearts of characters whose lives are forever changed by this eventful summer.
Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet, The God of the Woods is a story of love, inheritance, identity, and second chances, a thrillingly layered drama about the tensions between a family and a community, and a history of secrets that will not let any of them go.’
Glyph by Ali Smith
‘It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost.
Is it imaginary? Is it real?
Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom.
What to do? She phones her sister.
In a chiarascuro dance through our increasingly bellicose era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making.
A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, it’s about what are our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness. This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world.’
Odyssey by Stephen Fry
‘Troy has fallen – and the victorious Greeks head home . . .
Setting sail, hero Odysseus dreams of lying in the arms of his beloved wife Penelope, and of teaching his son Telemachus a warrior’s ways. However, gods toy with the desires of little mortals. Angered by this upstart’s presumption, Poseidon – God of the ocean realms – curses our hero to wander the seas for ten long years.
Encountering one-eyed giants, six-headed monsters, terrible storms, titanic whirlpools, hypnotic sirens, seductive witches and jealous goddesses, Odysseus is tempted and tormented beyond any man’s endurance.
Yet he is no mere mortal – and the lure of his wife and son draws him, step by step, stroke by stroke, ever closer to home and his destiny . . .
A tale of love and longing, return and redemption, home and hope, Stephen Fry’s Odyssey sees the author and national treasure weave together the final fabulous threads of the tapestry begun in worldwide bestseller, Mythos. It is a story for the ages – and all ages.’
Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake
‘Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally respected.
After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she’s taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as easy prey.
Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner’s new position at the cutthroat University. After 18 months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane’s clothes don’t fit right, her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is, and even the few hours a day she’s apart from her child fill her psyche with paralyzing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane so desperately craves.
As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power.’
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