‘Spectacular’ – The Sunday Times‘Quartet in Autumn is immeasurably her finest work of fiction’ – Evening Standard‘Barbara Pym has a sharp eye for the exact nuances of social behaviour’ – The TimesDeliciously, blackly funny and full of obstinate optimism, Quartet in Autumn is a classic. Part of the Picador Collection, it shows Barbara Pym’s sensitive artistry at its most sparkling. Its world is both extraordinary and familiar, revealing the eccentricities of everyday life. In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness.Lovingly and with delightful humour, Barbara Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and – perhaps most keenly felt – their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them.

Barbara Pym’s unpretentious, subtle, accomplished novels . . . are for me the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past 75 years . . . spectacular, Barbara Pym has a sharp eye for the exact nuances of social behaviour, The wit and style of a twentieth-century Jane Austen, Very funny and keenly observant of the ridiculous as well as the pathetic in humanity, A spare masterpiece of loneliness in retirement

A writer from the age of sixteen, Barbara Pym has been acclaimed as ‘the most underrated writer of the century’ (Philip Larkin). Pym’s substantial reputation evolved through the publication of six novels from 1950 to 1961, then resumed in 1977 with the publication of Quartet in Autumn and three other novels. She died in 1980.