Jenny D points readers in the direction of the Guardian interview with Jilly Cooper today and it is an excellent piece - it makes you want to move to the English country and hang out with her and soak up all that niceness. Cooper is considered a "guilty pleasure" by some folks I guess, Jenny certainly isn't shying away from her affection for the author and I feel the same way for Katie Fforde (and also Trisha Ashley). There's something about these particular British writers who really appeal to me, they are certainly chick lit of a sort I suppose, although they always write about more mature woman (lord, I'm a mature woman!) and the plots center around family and friends more than shoes and shopping. (Not that there's anything wrong with that but....)

Fforde's characters are in their 30s, usually on a second profession and divorced with a child or two in tow. They are not glamour girls or savagely thin, and she delights in revealing the rumpleness of their homes and characters as she writes.

I love how heroines can be rumpled in her books!

Ashley goes almost one step further as eccentricity rules the day in her worlds. In Every Woman For Herself the family is named after the Brontes by a father desperate for literary flair but they all patently refuse to become great doomed writers. They are all eccentrics though and I don't know if I fell in love more with the romance or the family dinners in this one. Ashely has a new book out in hardcover that I'm so looking forward to, but while I will make the annual purchase from amazon uk (shipping costs be damned!) I will not go for the hardcover. Some lines must be drawn!!! But boy, is this waiting hard.

I'm hoping that the Ashely pb shows up soon because Katie Fforde's latest is in paper and I want it in a major way. Christina Jones also has a couple of books in paper that I'd like, so there is a very fun box from England looming in my future. They are just, well, they are well written and funny and hopeful books and they have an a certain sensibility that does not make it across the Atlantic. I like them partly for their acute Britishness, if that makes any sense and certainly value them for never failing to make me feel better at the end.

Jilly Cooper for you and Katie Fforde (and Ashley and Jones) for me. We all need a gentle read every now and again and I certainly won't be ashamed of mine.