189 pages
English language
Published July 6, 1990 by Avon.
Set in 1954, this is a tale narrated by one Mrs Agnes Hawkins, a plump, forthright and no-nonsense young war widow. Nancy (as she is called) is the calm at the center of the perennial storm in the offices of a struggling London publishing house in the difficult years after WWII. At work and at her seedy boarding house she is involved with a cast of characters ranging from the charmingly useless to the downright unhinged; included an author she rejects and who tries to revenge himself through a quack science known as "radionics" (use of radio waves to influence health).
Although it's really about living in Kensington in the 1950s it is also the story of a woman who seems to devote herself to referring to a particular journalist as a hack and does so at all possible moments. .I mean, he is a hack, but why do so in French?
