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Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.

'Obsessed with sex!' said Jassy, 'there's nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I'm a pygmalionist.'

In the end we got more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding.
'Ducks can only copulate,' said Linda, after studying this for a while, 'in running water. Good luck to them.'

Oh, the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the lookout for the perfect lover.

But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters had thought. Linda must suffer marriage first to a stuffy Tory MP and then to a handsome and humourless communist, before finding real love in war-torn Paris. . .

'Utter, utter bliss' Daily Mail Utter, utter bliss * Daily Mail * A dazzling comic delight * Fiona Wilson, The Times, Saturday Review * The story's genius lies in its wicked humour, which remains relentlessly uplifting even as the Blitz begin to smash all the hopes of that pre-war arcadia * Olivia Laing, The Guardian * Too spiky and intelligent, I think, to qualify as an altogether cosy read [...] beneath the brittle surface of Mitford's wit there is something infinitely more melancholy at work - something that is apt to snag you and pull you into its dark undertow when you are least expecting it * Zoe Heller, The Telegraph * Nancy Mitford taught the wonderful truth that laughter can see you through the darkest hours of your life * Daily Mail * The Millennial faint-hearted will be appalled by Mitford's depiction of class and gender. But Mitford's triumph is that, as the Radletts live and laugh and cry, we [cry] with them * Julie Parsons, The Irish Times * In her novels Nancy mastered her life, making everyone who was different or difficult into figures of mirth, moving only among the aristocracy, and infusing the world with a spirit of lazy, delightful romance * Natasha Walter, The Independent *

The Pursuit of Love: Now a major series on BBC and Prime Video directed by Emily Mortimer and starring Lily James and Andrew Scott