[Reading] A Long Way From Verona - Jane Gardam

[white_hart]

I was prompted to re-read this by the news of Gardam's death a couple of weeks ago (and discovering that she was a colleague's mother-in-law). A Long Way From Verona was her first novel, published in 1971 but set during the Second World War, and it is so good on just how it feels to be an awkward, unpopular teenager surrounded by people who are preoccupied with their own stuff. (It was published as a children's book, though I think that it's much more that it is a book about someone who happens to be a child. I understood the ending better now than I did as a teenager, where quite a lot of it went over my head rather.)