A Few Green Leaves

The final novel by the famed British novelist Barbara Pym—a characteristically witty story about an academic who becomes enmeshed in the eccentric village life that she means to study.

Completed barely two months before her death, A Few Green Leaves was Barbara Pym’s last novel, and is an acutely observed and wry portrait of an English village in the 1970s. The book follows Emma Howick, an academic in her mid-thirties, who moves to her mother’s cottage in a small West Oxfordshire village.

Emma hopes to write an anthropological study of modern village life, but she soon grows to be a part of that life as she comes to know the eccentric and delightful villagers: widowed rector Tom Dagnall and his Hellenophile sister Daphne; old Dr. G., who treats young patients, and young Dr. Shrubsole, who tends to the geriatric; former Anglican priest, now food critic Adam Price; and many others.

The villagers and their myriad wants spur Emma to contemplate her own desires, and when an old flame reappears in her life, she must decide between staying in the past or moving boldly beyond it, into the future.