Darling: A razor-sharp, gloriously funny retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love

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After writing an article in The Sunday Times about her daughter's special needs - her youngest child has DiGeorge syndrome. There are good lovely things, owned by the creative bohemians (squashy sofas, dogs, “square-cut antique emerald cufflinks”), and bad lovely things, owned by the Ukip-voting parvenus (Hunter wellies) and the faux-commie Etonians (slim hardback novels). No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. She knows she doesn't want to marry 'a man who looks like a pudding', as her good and dull sister Louisa has done, and marries the flashy, handsome son of a UKIP peer instead.

It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.I found myself tearing through, beguiled by Knight's faithful channelling of Radlett ways, wiles and speech patterns . Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. What it lacks in original storytelling, Darling more than makes up for in atmosphere and fresh jokes. In fact, nobody in my book group really rated it - mostly, the reaction was: "Why bother writing it at all? A Little Luck is the story about the debilitating weight of lies, the messy line between bravery and cowardice, and the tragedies, big and small, that can ripple out from a single decisive event.

If we told someone that this was our life,” says the central character in Darling, “they wouldn’t believe us. I expect that most people who read it will know that this is a contemporary retelling of Nancy Mitford’s wonderful The Pursuit of Love.

Marooned in a sprawling farmhouse in Norfolk, teenage Linda Radlett feels herself destined for greater things. My favourite passage is the list of Things That Uncle Matthew Doesn't Like - absolute comedy genius. Her story is told by Fran, the cousin who had been sent to grow up with the Radletts when it became clear that her care-free mother couldn’t give her the stable childhood she needed.

Es ist wunderbar amüsant, die Charaktere wurden auf überzeugende Weise in die Gegenwart transportiert! I came across at least three sentences which made me stumble, because there are mistakes in them which should have been sorted out. But Darling is a treat, with whip-smart dialogue, larger-than- life characters, witty observations and a heart-breaking twist . Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). You can almost feel Knight giggling as she invents a new lexicon for the Radletts: “If people were short – all the Radletts were long-limbed and rangy and viewed short people with fascination and envy (‘It must be so cosy to be short,’ Linda said) – we’d say they were ‘still growing’, even if they were adults: ‘What’s she like?India Knight does a fantastic job of capturing the essence of Mitford's original story but brings overlays modernity that makes it more relatable for today.

Their madcap world is peopled by creations such as Fanny’s serial monogamist mother The Bolter and irascible patriarch Uncle Matthew, who enjoys xenophobia and hunting his children with bloodhounds across the Oxfordshire countryside. This blog hosts a selection of articles written from 2013 to the present, mostly focusing on my book reviews, which are uploaded frequently.

Linda remains “soft-shelled as well as soft-hearted, with an overabundance of trusting optimism and friendliness”. Knight also takes a gleeful magnifying glass to the hypocrisies of modern life, from rigorous dieter Blanche going to restaurants solely for social media content, to Christian making Linda do all the housework, because paying a cleaner is “immoral”.