A Tangled Summer

By Caroline Kington

A TALE OF BARLEY, BLACKBERRIES AND SOME VERY BAD BEHAVIOUR.

'A wonderful, witty read' – Woman’s Weekly

In the West Country village of Summerstoke, the family at Marsh Farm are too preoccupied with living their lives to notice the farm sliding into ruin.

Charlie Tucker, dreaming of victory in a motocross race and flirting with the local barmaid, is unaware of the danger the farm is in; while little sister Alison, busy with her A levels, is determined to dispense with her virginity before the end of the summer and falls for the enigmatic biker, Al. Their brother Stephen is hopelessly in love with the star of the local am-dram society, while mother Jenny dreams of escaping to Weston-super-Mare in the arms of the local vet.

Fed up with watching her family squander their birthright, septuagenarian grandmother Elsie – the only Tucker with a lover – issues an ultimatum: either her grandsons find brides by the end of the year, or they lose their share of the farm. And that’s only half the problem...

Up on the hill in Summerstoke House, the land-grabbing, unscrupulous, Hugh and Veronica (call-me-Vee) Lester watch the demise of Marsh Farm with undisguised pleasure. If they can get the Tuckers turfed off the land, their dreams of owning a bigger stud farm will become a reality.

And at Summerstoke Manor, in the heart of the village, live the three elderly Miss Merfields and their ancient nanny, with nothing better to do than pull strings and watch.

A Tangled Summer is the first in the bestselling Summerstoke Trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lightning Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785630958

Caroline Kington

Caroline Kington spent most of her working life in theatre and television, as a director, producer and founder of the fringe theatre company Antidote Theatre. She was the first, and perhaps still the only, woman to play Othello in a production in the US Midwest. Since the death of her husband Miles Kington, the columnist and broadcaster, she has posthumously published three of his books: a humorous memoir of his illness, called How Shall I Tell the Dog?; a collection of his columns and other writings, The Best By Miles; and a collection of his celebrated ‘Franglais’ columns that had not appeared in book form before, Le Bumper Book of Franglais. In her own right, she is the author of the Summerstoke trilogy of rural comedies. She insists that no character in the series is based on anybody from the small village near Bath where she has lived for many years. Nobody believes her. More recently she has written A Long Shadow, a novel which had its origins in a feature she made for Channel 4 News at the turn of this century about the pressures on farmers as a result of BSE and foot-and-mouth disease.