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Mr Finchley Discovers His England
Book 1 in the Classic Canning series.
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Edgar Finchley is a forty-five-year-old solicitor’s clerk who has never taken a proper holiday. His carefully planned trip to Margate is overturned when he falls asleep in a motorcar, wakes to find it being stolen and becomes an unwilling passenger in a police chase. Once released, he abandons his timetable and travels west through England by bicycle, on foot and by whatever transport chance provides.
A succession of encounters takes him through towns, farms, hostels and coastal communities before a smuggling yacht finally carries him back towards London. The comedy comes from the contrast between Finchley’s respectability and the improvised life he discovers beyond the office. Published in 1934, the novel also records interwar travel, leisure and the English countryside before mass car ownership transformed them.
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