If you want to escape where we are today, this is a lovely way to do that.

The Brandons takes place just before WWII, in a quaint English country hamlet. The action takes place mostly at Stories, the Brandon’s estate; at the vicarage; and at Brandon Abbey, a remote, dark and depressing estate. Mrs. Brandon, who married into the family but is now a widow, her adult son and young adult daughter, live at Stories, adjacent to the vicarage.

The book starts with a letter from Aunt Sissie, Mrs. Brandon’s dead-husband’s aunt, who lives at Brandon Abbey. Aunt Sissie is lonely – for very good reasons for she is a very hard person to get along with – who leverages her estate to get her grand-nieces and -nephews to pay attention to her. To be honest, they don’t much care what she does with her estate; they just feel sorry for her, being so lonely and unloved; and so, they respond to her commands.

When they arrive at Brandon Abbey, the family makes two discoveries: first, they meet the cousin that Aunt Sissie is always threatening to leave the estate to, instead of them – and they are happy to meet him and, until they get to know him as a person, they wish that she would leave her estate to him; and they meet Miss Morris, Aunt Sissie’s latest companion. Miss Morris grew up as a Vicar’s daughter but, after her the dictatorial father drove off the sensitive young curate that she felt akin to; and then after her father’s death left her penniless, enslaved to caregiving jobs for the elderly, at jobs that wouldn’t allow her to save for the future, she has ended up at Brandon Abbey, caring for the tyrannical Aunt Sissie.

And then it turns out that Miss Morris happens to have been acquainted with vicar adjacent to The Stories, although he quarreled with her father before they could really resolve how they felt. Can they overcome their memories of Miss Morris’s father

When you need a book full of peace, where everything works out right in the end, there is nothing like Angela Thirkell.

And nothing like the Brandons.

I once read in a British novel – perhaps it was a murder mystery, maybe in a Miss Silver mystery – of a novelist who wrote stories in which nothing happened.

And that perfectly describes Angel Thirkell.