Halfway House: A Comedy of Degrees

At fifty, John Germain has mastered the art of comfortable solitude. A distinguished widower with an estate in rural England, he's grown accustomed to his own company until Mary Middleham arrives: young, sharp-witted, and utterly unimpressed by his status. What begins as a comedy of manners, a gentle mockery of the social rituals that separate them, slowly becomes something neither expected. The distance between them is not just years or pounds; it's the entire architecture of English class. Yet love has a way of making fools of degrees, and Hewlett writes with wicked precision about the absurdities people will commit in its name. This is a comedy of manners with real heart beneath its wit, a portrait of how two people might bridge a chasm that society insists is unbridgeable. For readers who adore the social comedies of Austen and Trollope but crave something with fresher nerve and more playful malice.