Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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Rose maintains a private code and set of beliefs Aroon can only understand as ‘peasant gabbling prayer’. I've put 'good' in inverted commas, because it's behaviour but the 'good' part is certainly in question as we follow their shenanigans playing musical beds, drama with the governess and the neighbours etcetera etcetera all under the 'innocent' eyes of Aroon, born and well bred with the 'stiff upper lip' culture. It was the era of the “Big House,” the grand manors of the landed gentry owned by Protestant families and serviced by the Catholic “underclass. She disdains Aroon, not only because her daughter is large and ungainly, but also because she views the girl as a rival for the attention of Major St. She lifted the small silver fork (our crest, a fox rampant, almost handled and washed away by use) as though she were heaving up a load of stinking fish: ‘The smell – I’m – ’ She gave a trembling, tearing cry, vomited dreadfully, and fell back into the nest of pretty pillows.

She wipes her fingers on tissues taken from a cardboard box that she has covered, she tells us, in shell pink brocade. Seeing her own name on that makeshift coffin, Molly knew how near she had come to sharing that fate.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. It might be in the wonderful tension between the characters, the spite, misunderstandings so much going on unsaid – the sad loneliness of being part of a family like the St, Charles. I’d really only started because when I was seventeen the doctor said there was a threat I might have TB and I had to stay in bed. The Skrines were true imperialists: Canada was as much their orbit as Bath, Antrim, or even Mauritius, where Agnes had been born in 1864, to parents who were first cousins and colonial administrators.

It is obvious to the reader (and indeed to several of the other characters) that instead Richard and Aroon's brother Hubert were having a homosexual affair. Keane's ruthless analysis permits the reader to see the folly and the disaster of Good Behaviour smothering any natural feeling in this family. He liked dressing up, too, but Mrs Brock felt that such games were not quite the thing for little boys.

Looking back to the early years of the Booker short list, I realise that it brought to our attention some authors who would otherwise have escaped the public eye, and who subsequently did disappear from view for one reason or another. and young adulthood, during which bosomy Aroon’s physical being is at odds with the aesthetic of the 1920s but she allows herself to have hopes of her brother’s friend, Richard. It was a deeply sad letter, being such a clear indication that the end was near, but it was also a wonderfully generous gift.