The Bachelor — Stella Gibbons

In St Alberics, Hertfordshire, stands a newly built family home: Sunglades. Its seven rooms house Kenneth and Constance Fielding, middle-aged bachelor and spinster, along with Kenneth's old flame, an industrious Balkan exile, a young economist and the Fieldings' raffish father. Together they attempt to create a rural idyll precariously close to the remains of blitzed London.