Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

‘Devastating, delicate, hilarious and unflinching‘ David Baddiel On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are a mixed bunch - magnificently flawed and eccentric - living off crumbs of affection and an obsessive interest in the hotel menu. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper. And then one day, Mrs Palfrey meets the handsome young writer Ludo, and an unlikely friendship is formed... ‘Elizabeth Taylor‘s exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp and witty portrait of genteel postwar English life facing the changes taking shape in the 60s . . . Much of the reader‘s joy lies in the exquisite subtlety in Taylor‘s depiction of all the relationships, the sharp brevity of her wit, and the apparently effortless way the plot unfolds . . . Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is, for me, her masterpiece‘ Robert McCrum, ‘100 Best Novels‘, Guardian