Darling: A razor-sharp, gloriously funny retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love

Product Information

Armed with a key and new knowledge about his parents' past, Nik sets out to unlock the secrets that his mother has been holding onto his whole life.

As well as Mitford, there is something of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s much-adored Cazalet Chronicles in here, plus elements of Eva Rice’s The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack. What it lacks in original storytelling, Darling more than makes up for in atmosphere and fresh jokes. She knows she doesn't want to marry 'a man who looks like a pudding', as her good and dull sister Louisa has done, and marries the flashy, handsome son of a UKIP peer instead.Knight's effervescence of language magnifies the eccentricities of the families to satirical levels. The Pursuit of Love has scarcely been out of print since initial publication, and is not yet out of copyright. Uncle Matthew is now a retired rock-star who wants to protect his children from the tabloids; Lord Merlin, the effete neighbour in Mitford’s original, becomes fashion wunderkind Merlin Berners (a nod to Lord Berners, who inspired the character); Davey, obsessed with his health, fits seamlessly into the modern world: “‘I have a lot of time for the late Dr Mayr’s method.

It’s easy to dismiss the domestic, but if home is where the heart is, the heart is where all humanity happens.Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street. Linda’s daughter Moira (deathlessly described by Mitford as a ‘howling orange in a fine black wig’) is gaily abandoned in the original; here she remains a beloved, if semi-detached, family member. For a reader unfamiliar with Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, India Knight’s reimagining would be a perfect comfort read: the kind of book you take into the bath and keep reading even when the water has gone cold, a one-sitting dark-at-four joy. Some tweaks reflect contemporary sensibilities: sea swimming replaces hunting, and most of the characters have jobs: Linda runs a Dalston café, and her one true love, Fabrice, owns chic boutique hotels. The lives of Rafiq’s three children becoming increasingly dependent on their relationship to money:Siver, the only daughter, escapes into an unhappy marriage in Baghdad before fleeing to raise her daughter as a single mother in Dubai.

Eventually Linda does find her way out from the bosom of her deeply eccentric extended family and moves to London to become a model. Husband two, anti-capitalist Christian (nicknamed “posh Trot” by Uncle Matthew), meanwhile, is an Old Etonian who puts about a myth that he grew up on a housing estate in Doncaster. Their unique, somewhat cloistered, childhood let their imaginations run rife; growing up is an adventure. Briefly, then, for that reader: teenage Linda Radlett lives in “the very definition of emptiness” (north Norfolk).

A razor-sharp, laugh-out-loud novel that re-imagines the cast of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. But Darling is a treat , with whip-smart dialogue , larger-than- life characters , witty observations and a heart-breaking twist . Delight the bookworm in your life with the gift of this hilarious and heartbreaking modern-day adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s classic, The Pursuit of Happiness.