"The grandmother cried, 'Don't go yet, tell me more. What about my rose beds?' Her son seized the trumpet...and shouted down its black depths, 'Dead animals floating everywhere. Your roses are completely covered'"

At the beginning of June the river floods, ducks swim through the drawing-room windows and Ebin Willoweed rows his daughters round the submerged garden. The grandmother dresses in magenta for her seventy-first-birthday whist drive and looks forward to the first prize of pate de foie gras. Later Ives the gardener leads a morose procession up river, dragging her to a funeral in a black-draped punt. The miller goes mad and drowns himself and a cottage is set alight. Villagers keep dying and at the house on the river plates are thrown across the luncheon table and a tortoise through a window. The newspaper asks "Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?" Originally publish in 1954, this strange novel with its macabre humor, speaks with Barbara Comyns' unique and magical voice.

Barbara Comyns was born at Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1909. She was mianly educated by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratford-on-Avon and London. She has worked in an advertising agency, a typewriting bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats and has exhibited pictures in The London Group. She was married first in 1931, to an artist, and for the second time in 1945. She and her second husband lived in Spain for 18 years.

She started writing fiction at the age of ten and her first novel, Sisters by a River, was published in 1947. Since then she has published 7 noves: Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Who was Changed and Who was Dead, The Vet's Daughter, The Skin Chairs, Birds in Tiny Cages, A Touch of Mistletoe, and The Juniper Tree. She is also the author of Out of the Red into the Blue which describes her time in Spain. The Vet's Daughter is her best-Known novel, and has been both serialized and dramatised by BBC Radio; it was also turned into a musical called The Clapham Wonder by Dandy Wilson of The Boy Friend fame. Barbara Comyns has one son, one daughter, seven grandchildren and one great grandchild. She lives in Twickenham, Middlesex.