Book
The Piping Times
First published 1945
Farnol returns to the England of bustles, Home Rule debates and country roads before the motor car transformed rural travel. A journey through Sussex and toward Devon and Cornwall brings Tom into a succession of inns, estates and eccentric households, including the disruptive presence of the independent American Samantha. Romance develops through movement rather than drawing-room confinement.
The novel is less concerned with a single political crisis than with the texture of late Victorian life at the edge of modernity. Horses, servants, manor houses, village assumptions and the slower geography of the road still organise daily experience, while transatlantic visitors and political argument signal a wider world pressing in. Farnol treats that disappearing social landscape with affectionate comedy rather than simple nostalgia.
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