Cold Comfort Farm

by Stella Gibbons, Lynne Truss (Introduction)

Overview

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

'Brilliant ... very probably the funniest book ever written' Sunday Times

When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly-named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine; and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. But Flora loves nothing better than to organise other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and ruthless parody of rural melodramas and purple prose, Cold Comfort Farm is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.

'Screamingly funny and wildly subversive' Marian Keyes, Guardian

The Penguin Classics edition of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm is introduced by Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

If you enjoyed Cold Comfort Farm you might like George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, also available in Penguin Classics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780141920078
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	10/26/2006
Series:	Penguin Modern Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	385,896
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) was an immediate success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Nightingale Wood (1938), The Bachelor (1944), Westwood (1946), and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

Editorial Reviews

Quite simply one of the funniest satirical novels of the last century.
— NPR's Morning Edition

Nancy Pearl

Delicious . . . Cold Comfort Farm has the sunniness of a P. G. Wodehouse and the comic aplomb of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.

The Independent