via Savills
I’m in the middle of reading September by Rosamunde Pilcher (which is a perfect holiday book) and this room seems exactly right for that genteel world.
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I’m reading ‘September’ too. Rosamunde Pilcher is an under rated writer in my opinion – pushed into the beach reads category and dismissed as lightweight romantic fiction. Every time I finish one of her novels I wonder how she makes the reading so effortless.
The worlds she describes are pitch perfect with no jarring details and I can only assume that she was writing from memory about places she had known intimately. One of the things I particularly enjoy is her use of flowers to set the scene and I know that she never matches flowers to the wrong season so she must have been a keen gardener. The protagonists are types and yet they are real enough to feel like a community you want to be part of. I think Pilcher was in the same tradition as Anthony Trollope – writing for the popular market but with affection for human frailty and a curatorial eye for the relationship between people and their possessions.
I have slightly more complicated feelings about Pilcher, but I can definitely agree that she knows how to set a scene and does so beautifully.