A Source of Embarrassment

Edith Trembath's charming inability to cope with problems of everyday life is a constant source of embarrassment to her friends and family. Unwittingly, she provokes friends and enemies alike, and has a disconcerting habit of not finishing what she is saying. When Edith hints that she has an incurable illness and might soon be departing this world, the lives of her acquaintances become even more complicated. Edith's sixteen year old daughter Corinne falls hopelessly in love with her brother Robert; and Edith's husband becomes involved with another woman. It is left to Filmer, the mysterious gardener, to effect a cure for Edith's malady but his sinister methods are unorthodox to say the least. The delicacy of A. L. Barker's style harbours dark shadows of the macabre, the distressing and the bizarre.

'A quirky, bizarre, earthy book...Miss Barker transfixes ordinariness with her arrowed prose.' Sunday Times

'She writes with witty undertone, stylish, oblique...like a 1970's Jane Austen.' The Observer