One Fine Day

I hesitate to use an overworked booksellers’ phrase, but I can’t get around the fact that this 1947 novel epitomizes the “rediscovered gem.” It’s a 170-page story about a woman, a family, and a village on one radiant summer day a year after the end of WWII. Panter-Downes is a meticulous craftsperson and her descriptions are charmingly apt. Sheep run with the “rapid little steps of elderly ladies trying to catch a bus," two matrons of different classes wage an undeclared war, “pitting the sniff delicate against the sniff insolent”—and the written world is visible, audible. Her wistful, but not mournful, rumination on the ways war reshaped the English caste system makes the book veddy, veddy British, but I shared the uneasiness of those who had just come through an ordeal personally unscathed but unable to regain their balance. While light and compact, this book holds hints of the weighty vastness of history and time. Read savoringly.