Margaret Kennedy Libri

This 'superb' (Elizabeth Bowen) rediscovered gem will make you nostalgic for 1940s seaside holidays: a Cornish hotel is mysteriously buried by a landslide, but what brought its eccentric guests together?

Kate is bored of being overlooked by her grown-up children and decides to escape on an Aegean cruise. She ends up in Keritha - a mysterious Greek island all but forgotten by the modern world. But under the spell of this strange and beautiful island both visitors find themselves, and each other, cast in a new light.

The problem must lie, she thinks, in her marriage to Alec, and a neat, civilised divorce seems the perfect solution. But talk of divorce sparks interference from family and friends, and soon public opinion tears into the fragile fabric of family life and private desire.

Agatha is aware of an intensity, a powerful storm of emotion briefly awakened by a shortlived love affair with her cousin Gerald, that is entirely lacking from the successful marriage on which she is about to embark. Beautiful, young and carefully brought up, Agatha knows she is securing a perfect and luxurious future in marrying handsome John Clewer and becoming Mistress of Lyndon, and she soon becomes the perfect country house hostess. But when Gerald reappears and war in Europe disturbs the sheltered comfort of Lyndon forever, Agatha is once again haunted by the idea of a different life.

Avant-garde composer Albert Sanger lives in a ramshackle chalet in the Swiss Alps, surrounded by his 'Circus' of assorted children, admirers and a slatternly mistress. The family and their home life may be chaotic, but visitors fall into an enchantment, and the claims of respectable life or upbringing fall away.

`Margaret Kennedy caught just the taste of the time, mixing a stolid domestic Englishness with 'Continental' bohemians' Irish Times William and Emily Crowne seem to have it all - they live a life of privilege and glamour in London, the children of a successful poet, attractive, happy, largely blind to the world around them.

'Most people knew in their hearts that the lid had been taken off hell, and that what had been done in Guernica would one day be done in London, Paris and Berlin.'Margaret Kennedy's prophetic words, written about the pre-war mood in Europe, give the tone of this riveting 1941 wartime memoir: it is Mrs Miniver with the gloves off. Her account, taken from her war diaries, conveys the tension, frustration and bewilderment of the progression of the war, and the terror of knowing that the worst is to come, but not yet knowing what the worst will be.English bravery, confusion, stubbornness and dark humour ('Nanny says that an Abbess is threatening to swallow the whole of Europe') provide the positive, more hopeful side of her experiences, in which she and her children move from Surrey to Cornwall, to sit out the war amidst a quietly efficient Home Guard and the most scandalous rumours. Where Stands A Wingèd Sentry (the title comes from a 17th-century poem by Henry Vaughan) was only published in the USA, and has never been published in the UK before.