Dear Great Book Guru, I am so excited…. the Barbara Pym Society of Sea Cliff will be attending the North American Pym Society’s annual conference in Cambridge Massachusetts next week.  We are putting on a dramatized reading of one of Pym’s novels.  I hope to meet up with Pym fans from around the world. Passionate Pym Player

Dear Passionate Pym Player, What fun awaits you and your friends!  Barbara Pym’s A FEW GREEN LEAVES is the last of the novels written by Pym - completed a few months before her death in 1980.  Set in the 1970’s in  a small village outside of London, the story centers on the changes that society has experienced since Pym’s first novel in 1935, SOME TAME GAZELLE.  The Church’s role has been replaced by the medical offices where prescriptions for the villagers have taken the place of blessings.  Emma Howick has recently moved from London and finds herself studying the villagers through her practiced anthropologist’s eye. The characters include a rather ineffectual widowed clergyman Tom, his sister Daphne who yearns to leave for life on  a Greek island, the local doctor who hands out those prescriptions to the ill and not so ill, a former lover of Emma’s Graham Pettifer who settles in to finish a novel, a former clergyman turned food critic, and numerous other eccentrics  who play  varying roles in the life of the village.  Throughout the often-hilarious encounters, there is a sense of melancholy as one sees the inevitable changes that time has brought to this once vibrant village.  Dan DiPietro’s adaptation, to be performed at the conference, captures this and the cast he has assembled bring it to life. Highly recommended!