A Few Green Leaves

Completed barely two months before her death, Pym’s last novel is an incisive and wry portrait of life in an English village in Oxfordshire. It is also certain to be considered by many her masterwork. In A Few Green Leaves the author combines the rural setting of her earliest novels with many of the themes–and even some characters–of her later ones. Switching points of view among many characters, she builds with accumulating effect the picture of life in a town forgotten by time yet affected dramatically by it. Historical time–represented by Druid ruins, the local eighteenth-century country manor, and the last aristocrats who occupied it in the 1920’s–is juxtaposed against the banalities of life in today’s world.