Our Spoons Came From Woolworths

For anyone who is interested in stories of everyday concerns, poverty, marriage, love, happiness, fulfilment, peace or joy, this is the book for you – Snowswick * Guardian *A curious hybrid: a mixture of domestic disaster, social commentary, comedy, and romance … What I find so really excellent in this novel, in addition to Comyns’s powers of description and the slow fuse of her comedy, is her ability to show the cold world and its indecencies without spelling everything out … – Katherine A. Powers * Barnes & Noble Review *Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful … there’s also something uniquely original about her voice. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius – Lucy Scholes * Observer *I defy anyone to read the opening pages and not to be drawn in, as I was … Quite simply, Comyns writes like no one else – Maggie O’Farrell

Barbara Comyns (1909-92) was born in Bidford-on-Avon in Warwickshire. She was an artist and writer, worked in advertising, dealt in old cars and antiques, bred poodles and developed property. She was twice married, and she and her second husband lived in Spain for eighteen years, returning to the UK in the early 1970s. She is the author of eleven books, including SISTERS BY A RIVER (1947), OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS (1950), THE VET’S DAUGHTER (1959), THE SKIN CHAIRS (1962) and A TOUCH OF MISTLETOE (1967). She died in Shropshire in 1992.