Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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S. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film stars Nicolas Cage as the frontiersman Miller and Fred Hechinger.

Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon—the silver gleams, the linens glow—of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. It is like a more literary incarnation of that nightmarish character from Harry Potter, Dolores Umbridge, inflicting cruel pain from a fluffy pink frilly smiling exterior.But this is a version of Anglo-Irish decline as far as possible from the plangent world of William Trevor, or even Elizabeth Bowen.

Neglected by her philandering father, despised by her icy mother, used by her charming brother, she pines for love and approval. Looking back to the early years of the Booker short list, I realise that it brought to our attention some authors who would otherwise have escaped the public eye, and who subsequently did disappear from view for one reason or another.In The Rising Tide Enid tries to get rid of her baby but is discovered and married off, unhappily, instead. When her guest asked for something to read, Keane produced a manuscript that had been 'turned down flat'.

Aroon, large and unlovely daughter of an Anglo-Irish family looks back from middle age to her childhood in the south of Ireland wondering why the lives of her nearest and dearest were so perplexingly unhappy.

Keane liked to explain that she stole the name from a sign she saw over a pub when she was out hunting, and even if this wasn’t strictly true it was apt. The stifling closed world of the decaying Anglo-Irish ascendancy is Molly Keane's chose

Molly Keane was in her late seventies when Good Behaviour was first published in 1981 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize ( Midnight’s Children won).She knows exactly how to turn the conversation to the weather or when to decide to exercise a horse if emotion needs to be deflected, but she is a finely tuned instrument when it comes to her own feelings.