Miss Buncle's Book

This is one of the most charming books that I've ever read. It’s warm and funny and gently satirical. It has a fairly unusual plot, and it's very well written. It's an easy read in the sense that the narrative carries you along, and it's so absorbing that it's hard to put the book down.

Miss Buncle's Book is set in the 1930's, in a small English village called Silverstream. The inhabitants of the village are a colourful lot, with their eccentricities, their rivalries, their constant need to one up each other, and the near universal tendency to gossip.

One of them, is Miss Barbara Buncle. She's a woman in her thirties, who's lived in Silverstream all her life. She's a sensible and friendly soul, but she's a bit of a nobody in the village, because she's not married and she's clearly not well off.

Miss Buncle decides that she must do something to supplement her meagre income. Neither she nor her maid, want to keep chickens or take in paying guests. So, she decides to write a book set in an English village with characters who might be her neighbours.

She draws a little too closely from life, however, and the result is a book, called Disturber of the Peace, with characters who are so lifelike and so appealing, that it becomes a bestseller.

Soon, her neighbours discover the book, and they start reading it, one after the other. They recognise themselves and each other quite easily. Some of them are amused, while others are furious at being turned into characters in a book, and shown up in all their ridiculousness.

Disturber of the Peace is published under the rather obvious pseudonym of John Smith, which leads everyone in the village to wonder who it could be. They try to find clues in the book, they hold meetings, they go to their lawyers, they threaten the publisher, all to no avail. This makes for some really funny scenes in the book.

Miss Buncle never expected that anyone in the village would read her book, let alone react as strongly as they do. And now they’re hot on the heels of her identity, doing and saying things that provide her with more and more material to write about...