darling books: comfort food at Quentins

  She had just got to telling the twins the bit of her very unhappy life where she hadn't been chosen for the hockey team.
  'It doesn't sound terribly unhappy,' Maud complained.
  'No real, awful things,' Simon added.
  'If you wanted to be on the First Eleven, and should have been, then that's pretty terrible,' Ella protested.
  Her phone rang again. This time it was Nick. She listened and her face got red and then white again. The twins watched her with interest. 'The bastard,' she said eventually. 'The class-A bastard.' She took down a number on the back of her notebook. 'Thanks, Nick, I'll get back to you on this.' Her voice was slightly shaky, but a promise was a promise.
  Those children had got their heads around quadratic equations. Now she had to tell them the story of an unhappy life. 'So the day of the school's hockey final approached...' she began.
  'Could you tell us about the bastard, please?' Maud asked politely. 'It sounds much more interesting.'

Maeve Binchy's novels - my comfort books, feel-good literature. Quentins is one of the best ones. Binchy does a neat story-teller trick in her writing that makes you get to know the characters in a roundabout manner - it's masterly and sometimes very funny. She tells several stories in one novel but it's always engaging and easy to follow. The characters feel like real flesh-and-blood people you might meet while walking down a street in Dublin.

And she makes you feel that if you are a normal, not very remarkable, and maybe very messed-up person, you may not get the happy ending you wish for but in the end, everything will be okay. And that actually, you are somehow very remarkable after all.

Yes, it's feel-good literature but it's anything but shallow. Any writer who makes me suspect that there is still hope and affection in the world gets my vote.