Cold Comfort Farm
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4.1 • 44 Ratings
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'Brilliant ... very probably the funniest book ever written' Sunday Times
When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly-named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine; and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. But Flora loves nothing better than to organise other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and ruthless parody of rural melodramas and purple prose, Cold Comfort Farm is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.
'Screamingly funny and wildly subversive' Marian Keyes, Guardian
The Penguin Classics edition of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm is introduced by Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
If you enjoyed Cold Comfort Farm you might like George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, also available in Penguin Classics.
Customer Reviews
Astonishingly wonderful!
Hand on heart: I hate reading, have never read a whole book in my 27 years of living and believe me, I was always trying(struggling) to get into one, but they were always too slow and boring so I ditched them (usually at the beginning to the middle), but I finished this one, front too back, I had heard it was very good and that my friend could not put it down... Neither could I! My parents were shocked, happy, (and relieved) that I actually finished a book, I told them to read it. They both knew why it was the only book they had ever read, they couldn't get in to another book after that because none of them could reach the standard, the quality or the content of this book. The best book my family and most of my friends had ever read as I had suggested it to everyone! It was a brilliant mash up of the weird and wonderful! An incredible book that would be enjoyed by all! It's a hidden gem that should most certainly go back on the GCSE curriculum as apparently it used to be in my fathers day when he was doing his O-Levels. AMAZING, BUY NOW!!!
This is science fiction!
I first read this book about 45 years ago, as a callow youth, on the recommendation of several friends who spent a long time persuading me that Cold Comfort Farm was a masterpiece, and should be compulsory reading for the entire population. At the time, I rarely read anything other than science fiction (I still read a lot of it but do now understand that other genres are just as entertaining and educational).
So because in the 70s I had a blinkered view of literature, I did take some persuading. There were no distant worlds, no dilemmas concerning alien races. What, I thought, could interest me in a book about simple country folk, a cross between Jane Austen and Emmerdale?
And yet, what none of my friends and few reviews of CCF ever mentioned (or, I think in many cases realised) was that CCF IS science fiction!
The novel is set in the near-to-then-future, and casually mentions TV phones and air taxis. There is a rather incompetent and authoritarian government, and Mayfair in London has become a sum area!
But this is not central to the novel; the main focus is an inbred rural community, whose many and complex problems the book's heroine, city girl
Flora Poste, sets out to resolve, and succeed, by various improbable means, in every respect.
This is a comic masterpiece which parodies rural historical novels about "simple country folk" and should be required reading for all callow youths who believe that literature begins and ends with science fiction!