The Demon in the House

In 1930s England, a beleaguered mother frets over her twelve-year-old's "skirmishes with the grown-up world and his schoolmasters . . . amusingly told" (Kirkus Reviews).
Laura Morland loves her son, Tony, unconditionally . . . even when he's talking everyone's ear off, accidentally breaking a window, shelling peas in the bathtub, or desperately trying to convince her to buy him a bicycle--the thought of which terrifies her. And of course Laura cherishes their time together when Tony's home on break, while secretly counting the minutes until he goes back to school . . .
This twentieth-century tale set in Anthony Trollope's beloved Barsetshire is a lighthearted and sharp-witted look at the life of the upper class in prewar England, and a funny portrait of the fraught relationship between a long-suffering mother and a demanding, rambunctious, and occasionally infuriating twelve-year-old boy.
Praise for Angela Thirkell and the Barsetshire novels
"Thirkell writes in a charmingly easy and intimate style." --The New York Times
"[Thirkell's] writing celebrates the solid parochial English virtues of stiff-upper-lippery, good-sportingness, dislike of fuss, and low-key irony. . . . Light, witty, easygoing books." --The New Yorker

Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) was a British author whose ability to produce one book a year, every year, and set in that year blurred the lines between novelist and social historian. Like so many of the writers that she admired--Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot--Thirkell shared their X-ray vision: an unmatched ability to assess the hypocrisies, desires, and prejudices of her characters and, better still, play them for laughs. Her biggest literary project, the Barsetshire Chronicles, consists of twenty-nine novels, each acting as another slice of English country life; a utopian vision of bucolic countryside, grand manors, and village fêtes.