The Dreaming Suburb

For some reason I'm getting notices of R.F. Delderfield books on me ebooks offers. I read most of these when they came out in the 1970's and they hold up remarkably well forty years later. This book is part of a two-book story about a suburb of London that beggins right after World War I and ends with the conclusion of the Second World War. This volume takes place from 1919 to 1940. There is no real story arch to this book. Rather it's character studies of the people who inhabit the street, and as such is interesting, both as a study of old-fashioned English "types" and as an historical look at life in England in a now-vanished age. A cozy and entertaining read.

I have a sneaking fondness for Delderfield, whose books are not great literature or hugely revelatory, but who does write involvingly about people at a small scale - a village or an estate or, in this case, an Avenue in the suburbs of London between the wars.