Stella Gibbons

... for the first time in her life, she was living as she had always unknowingly wanted to live: in freedom and solitude, with an animal for close companion. Her new life had acted upon her like a strong and delicious drug. Ivy Gower, a curmudgeonly middle-aged charwoman with some slightly witchy talents, inherits a rural cottage in Buckinghamshire and takes up residence near the tiny village of Little Warby. Having settled in with a rescued dog and...

James's gesture with the key was cautious because he was not always sure of who or what he would find in the hall when he got in. It might be someone in tears, or someone asleep while they filled up time waiting to catch a train, or someone drunk. James Muir has reason to be cautious about entering his own home. His wife Daisy just can't resist solving everyone else's problems. There's Delia Huxtable, a young unwed mother, and her daughter Evelyn...

Worn down by postwar London life, forty-something Lucy Cottrell finds herself accepting a surprise invitation to spend the summer at a Swiss chalet, accompanied by the very practical and undemonstrative Freda Blandish, whom she barely knows. The two are charged with inventorying the contents of the chalet, but distractions soon abound, first from Freda's slightly woebegone daughter Astra and her hoity-toity friend Kay, then from Lucy's godson Bertram...

Recently orphaned, Flora ignores the sage advise of Mrs. Smiley and moves to the country to live on a decrepit farm with her eccentric relatives, where she finds ample material for the novel she wishes to write.