The Demon in the House

In 1930s England, a beleaguered mother frets over her twelve-year-old’s “skirmishes with the grown-up world and his schoolmasters . . . amusingly told” (Kirkus Reviews).

Laura Morland loves her son, Tony, unconditionally . . . even when he’s talking everyone’s ear off, accidentally breaking a window, shelling peas in the bathtub, or desperately trying to convince her to buy him a bicycle—the thought of which terrifies her. And of course Laura cherishes their time together when Tony’s home on break, while secretly counting the minutes until he goes back to school . . .

This twentieth-century tale set in Anthony Trollope’s beloved Barsetshire is a lighthearted and sharp-witted look at the life of the upper class in prewar England, and a funny portrait of the fraught relationship between a long-suffering mother and a demanding, rambunctious, and occasionally infuriating twelve-year-old boy.

Praise for Angela Thirkell and the Barsetshire novels

“Thirkell writes in a charmingly easy and intimate style.” —The New York Times

“[Thirkell’s] writing celebrates the solid parochial English virtues of stiff-upper-lippery, good-sportingness, dislike of fuss, and low-key irony. . . . Light, witty, easygoing books.” —The New Yorker

Angela Thirkell (1890–1961) was a British author whose ability to produce one book a year, every year, and set in that year blurred the lines between novelist and social historian. Like so many of the writers that she admired—Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot—Thirkell shared their X-ray vision: an unmatched ability to assess the hypocrisies, desires, and prejudices of her characters and, better still, play them for laughs. Her biggest literary project, the Barsetshire Chronicles, consists of twenty-nine novels, each acting as another slice of English country life; a utopian vision of bucolic countryside, grand manors, and village fêtes.