EXCELLENT WOMEN by Barbara Pym

We all want to be happy- we all want a bathroom of our own - but this happiness, for an awful lot of us, is elusive. We fill our lives with small things, and they become immensely important to us. Barbara Pym understands that, and in celebrating these little things so vividly, she helps us, I think, to be more sympathetic to others. If it is a mark of a great novel that it should help us to feel for others, that it should touch our human capacity for sympathy in an important way, then Excellent Women, a novel that on one level is about very little, is a great novel about a great deal. The Guardian