Three Score and Ten

Barsetshire gathers to celebrate a milestone birthday at the Old Bank House in this conclusion to the much-loved, long-running series.

A home is saved from destruction, a budding romance takes steps toward the altar, a doctor experiences the return of a former love—and the fine people of Barsetshire make plans for a festive extravaganza to mark Mrs. Morland’s seventieth birthday . . . “Triumphantly completed” by Angela Thirkell’s close friend C. A. Lejeune after Thirkell’s death, Three Score and Ten features a host of new and old friends from the author’s acclaimed series spanning decades of English country life (The New York Times).

“Her 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

“Where Trollope would have been content to arouse a chuckle, [Thirkell] is constantly provoking us to hilarious laughter. . . . To read her is to get the feeling of knowing Barsetshire folk as well as if one had been born and bred in the county.” —Kirkus Reviews

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.