Huth, Angela

(British, 1938– )

Huth is a journalist and has written for radio and television. Her stories and novels are sharp and entertaining, full of acute psychological insights. Begin with The Land Girls (1994), a compelling read about three girls in the Second World War working on a Dorset farm; Prue, fresh from her mother's hairdressing shop, determined on romance but also surprisingly hardworking; dreamy Angela, straight from Cambridge University; and beautiful, lovelorn Stella. Huth is excellent on the physical detail of farm life, and also in the way she dissects the feelings of each character, especially John Lawrence the farmer, at first reluctant to have his life invaded by the girls, and then struggling with an obsessive attraction to Stella. Another Kind of Cinderella (1996) is an engaging collection of stories, and Easy Silence (1999) takes the lives of a long-married musician and a painter, at a point at which each has secretly fallen for someone new; in the husband's case, so obsessively that he plans to murder his wife.

Anne Tyler, Mary Wesley, Jane Austen  JR