The Feast: The classic vintage mystery

Description

'Tense, touching, human, dire, and funny, The Feast is a feast indeed.' - Elizabeth Bowen Cornwall, Midsummer 1947. Reverend Seddon is on his annual seaside holiday with Father Bott; but to his disgruntlement, his host is busy writing a funeral sermon after a local disaster. Pendizack Manor Hotel - a coastal boarding house perched in a sleepy cove - has just been buried in the rubble of a collapsed cliff. Seven guests have perished beneath the Cornish boulders: but who are they, and what brought this strange assembly together for a moonlit feast before succumbing to this Act of God - or Man? Over the course of a week before the landslide, we are introduced to these holidaymakers in all their eccentric glory: the selfish aristocrat and her bullying offspring; slothful hotelier; snooping housekeeper; jilted chambermaid; bohemian authoress with her chauffeur toyboy; bereaved couple; poverty-stricken family; cranky canon and his terrified daughter. As guests of all classes and backgrounds are thrown together, friendships form, romances blossom, sins are revealed, and the cliff cracks widen... 'Kennedy is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed.' - Anita Brookner

Margaret Kennedy was born in London in 1896 and read History at Somerville College, Oxford in 1915 (alongside Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain) where she began writing. In 1924, Kennedy's second novel The Constant Nymph became a worldwide bestseller which she adapted into a hit West End play starring Noel Coward (three different star-studded film versions followed). Described as 'superb' by Elizabeth Bowen, Kennedy wrote fifteen further prize-winning novels including The Feast in 1950, as well as literary criticism and a biography of Jane Austen. She died in 1967.