Rosemary Tonks

Mimi and Caroline set off to a beautiful Italian island, where they find themselves part of an eccentric cast of expats and vacationers including their debonair host and his mistress, a proud venture capitalist, an Iranian tycoon, and a villainous, slightly tragic local dentist. There is also Mimi’s great love, Beetle, a quiet and unassuming English journalist. As everyone begins to relax and settle into the vacation, drinking and eating away the stress of everyday life, their impish plots culminate in an odd Mediterranean prank involving the dentist’s prize lemon tree.

Back in print after many decades, Businessmen as Lovers is an extraordinarily jubilant and delightful novel by the inimitable Rosemary Tonks: businessmen fall in love, too, but it is with each other.

Sophie—a clever and charming young woman—is trying to get out from under her mother’s thumb. She’s in love with her childhood friend Philip (pragmatic, attractive, a bit of a bore), but she often worries that she loves him too much for her own good, and that he might only be another thumb to crawl under.

Both a sincere bildungsroman of Sophie’s attempt to seize a life for herself and a comic masterpiece with cutting observations and asides, The Halt During the Chase is flutteringly alive as it discusses different forms of love, adulthood (“Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?”), marriage, insecurity, and stifling British snobbery and classism. Sophie’s voice, fueled by Tonks’s acidic narration, evolves from thrashing about in various traps into a triumphant, croaky-throated liberation song.

Why do the only men I know carry wet umbrellas and say “Umm?” I’m being starved alive. Quick: the first bookshop for a copy of the Kama-Sutra.

Min works at the BBC as a sound engineer, and in theory she’s married, but her husband George is so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off even when he’s still in the room. Luckily, she has her friends and lovers to distract her: in Min’s self-lacerating, bracingly opinionated voice, life boils down to sex appeal—and of late she’s being courted by an internationally renowned opera singer whom she refers to as The Bloater (a swelled, salted herring). Disgusted by and attracted to him in equal measure, her dilemma—which reaches a hysterical, hilarious pitch—is whether to sleep with him or not.

Rosemary Tonks—the salt and pepper of the earth—is a writer who gets her claws into the reader with all the joy of a cat and a mouse. Vain and materialistic, tender and savage, narrated in brilliant, sparkling prose, The Bloater is the perfect snapshot of London in the 1960s.