Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Wise and witty mystery with a difference, originally published in 1950 and set in post-war Cornwall with a diverse cast of holidaying guests and staff.

From the beginning, we know that the cliff above has collapsed, engulfing the house and occupants. Reading on we discover more about each of the characters, their flaws, their feuds, their blossoming relationships, and which of the seven deadly sins they commit.

Searingly Funny…
A rediscovered and reissued classic tale in this mystery with a difference. Simply delightful in its sheer seeming simplicity, the deftly drawn eccentric cast of characters and the intricate plotline. Entertaining, engaging and often searingly funny. A gem.

A bunch of horrible people gather in a boarding house which we are told in advance will soon be destroyed with many of them dying and some not. At the 18% mark, I've realised I'd be fine if they all died - I just wish they'd do it quicker.

Each character is introduced and we are immediately made to dislike them intensely. More and more keep arriving and I'm not sure I've even met them all yet. A paragraph or two about one, then zip! A paragraph or two about another, then zip! No time to get interested in any individual. They're apparently supposed to be modelled on the seven deadly sins, but I must say that they each seem to have pretty much all the sins as far as I can see, and no virtues. They are also all dull, which I don't remember being a sin but in bookworld it certainly should be. Abandoned.

I adore this 1950 novel. ADORE IT. Have recommended it many, many times. (And often wonder: How did a director like, say, Alfred Hitchcock, never make a feature film version of it???!) So I was delighted to include this lovely new edition (and excellent introduction, which gives it so much context and deepens the reading) in the August instalment of Read & Recommended, the regular round-up of personal reading highlights by Zoomer magazine’s book section contributors.
Full review feature at link.

The Feast is something special: a novel set in a seaside hotel that defies all expectations.
At the start of the novel we know that the hotel has ceased to be. It has been swallowed by the cliff on which it sat. A tragedy has occurred. So, why is this book so funny?
There are some very odd people staying in the hotel for the summer season. So odd, that they are like caricatures. I started to look forward to the tragedy and couldn't help seeing it as a biblical judgment on the awfulness of the people within.
It is also tremendously satisfying. There are a number of hilarious set pieces I will not spoil and a delicious sense of impending doom. Wonderful stuff.

I have been reading some pretty heavy stuff lately, lots of climate change and injustice and I just needed a little escape before heading back into it. Thank goodness this book is being revived, I absolutely loved it, brilliant writing, eccentric characters, bad mothers, sex mad middle aged ladies... what's not to love. A true English comedy of manners!

What a classic! Loved the changes in characters and the allegory of the seven deadly sins. Really liked Kennedy's style of writing with her slight dry and dark humour and can't wait to delve into more of her writing!

“Father Bott is grey, stocky and hirsute; he looks rather like a Scotch terrier and he is not popular in the parish of St. Sody. Father Seddon has the dew-lapped melancholy of a bloodhound; his life is harder and more unpleasant, but his parishioners appreciate him”
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The Feast was first published in 1950, but is set at the height of summer in 1947. The Pendizack Hotel perches beneath the cliffs of the Cornish Coast and at the start of the novel, the local vicar is writing a eulogy for seven people who have died in an “act of God” as part of the cliff collapsed on the top of the hotel. The story then rewinds and charts the final seven days of the hotel and its occupants many of whom are odious


There’s the awful Lady Gifford who, it transpires, has swallowed a tapeworm to allow her to eat rich foods in the guide of nourishment and yet appear waif-like and unwell. Mr. Siddal, the hotel owner, does little to help his overworked wife and appears in his dressing gown in the middle of the day ready to bait his children over lunch with his pseudo-intellectual posturing. Meanwhile Cannon Wraxton has an explosive temper that has alienated his entire family other than his daughter Evangeline who is desperately trying to do the right thing by him. Seven days and seven deadly sins each represented in the characters killed off in an Act of God. The survivors of the landslide are the hotel staff and guests who provide an outdoor Feast for the three little Cove children who are mistreated by their mother. In providing this act of kindness they also save themselves


There is a vein of dry humour in Margaret Kennedy’s writing (as illustrated by the quote above) that stops the novel from feeling too moralistic or allegorical. Despite a large cast of characters, the author has managed to make each one distinct and their sins evident! The whole thing made far more sense to me when I learnt about the context of the story, a good reason to read the foreword first and not at the end like I normally do! It you’re a fan of Barbara Pym, I wonder if you might like this one too…..


Huge thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for my advanced reading copy of The Feast

One of the best books I have ever read, brilliantly introduced by the wonderful Cathy Rentzenbrink.

My overriding feeling on finishing this book was that I wanted to go right back to page one and read it all over again; immediately – something I don’t say lightly as I’m not much of a re-reader in general! 'The Feast' was great to read while not knowing what would happen, but I feel would be equally brilliant to read knowing what the end has in store… The narrative was so searingly perceptive in terms of character, politics, philosophy and human nature that there was much to think over and consider – even long after finishing. I particularly loved the window onto post second world war Britain – the snuffed out morale, disgruntled citizens, the petty grievances and selfishness, pitted against the joy that the simple acts of listening, giving, contributing and sharing can bring.

A disarmingly clever and thoroughly engaging read.

It is a rare thing to be presented with a book which is unlike most novels you have read previously; one that feels so contemporary and fresh, even though it is set in the 1940s. It is rarer still for that book to have been written over seventy years ago and for you never to have heard of it. For much of The Feast I could quite honestly have believed it was written this century, with only the occasional phrase, opinion or expression ‘giving away’ its true vintage.

I tend to read a lot of crime and mystery novels from this period and love the atmosphere evoked form a writer living at that time. This setting and atmosphere probably lead on occasion, to me appreciating these books more than their ‘quality’ should bring about. And although The Feast is probably helped in my estimation by its era and setting, it is so much more than just a time capsule; it is a brilliantly observed drama populated by a combination of entirely believable and equally incredible characters, yet all become utterly real. There is so much humour in this book and yet genuine humanity and empathy are its strongest aspects.

Margaret Kennedy was a wonderful writer – knowing of The Constant Nymph should probably show this, but The Feast is such a fresh and original book, I can’t believe I was not aware of this title before now. This could prove to be the best book I read all year.

This ended up being a great read which was surprising as we're told about the disastrous rock fall onto a hotel in Cornwall which resulted in several people being killed. I felt it was a wee bit slow to begin with but as the action moved back to the week before the disaster and I got to know all the guests and the family who owned the family home turned hotel I was drawn into it, hoping that the most ghastly characters didn't survive!

Warning – don’t read the introduction first! Far too much is given away. But make sure to read it afterwards as it definitely illuminates the novel’s themes.
What can I say? This is just fabulous. I enjoyed every single perfectly formed sentence. It’s so clever and witty and funny and sad and tragic. A superb comedy of manners – or perhaps tragedy of manners is more apt. It’s been hailed as the perfect staycation summer read, but in my opinion this diminishes it, as it makes it sound like some lightweight beach read. And it’s really not. It’s far darker than any beach read, far more sinister with some truly evil characters and some sadly wasted lives. Cornwall 1947: the drab and still rationed post-war period. The Pendizack Manor Hotel and a motley crew of guests descend. But theirs is not destined to be an idyllic summer holiday for we are told within a couple of pages that the hotel is doomed to be destroyed in a landslide – and there will be fatalities. So as we get to know proprietors and guests the impending disaster looms over them and us. First published in 1950 it’s wonderful to see this much deserved re-issue.

This is an odd little story. The ending is explicitly explained to us right at the start. An isolated seaside hotel is destroyed when a cliff collapses and 7 people are killed. There bodies, never found lie buried beneath the rocks. We are then taken back to the week before the collapse and get to know the hotel residents. It is in my nature to constantly speculate who might die and who might survive. Set in 1947 this is very much a post war story, the themes of rationing, sacrifice, austerity, and some people getting more than their fare share, run deep. I was a little dumbfounded as to why so many oddly unpleasant people were in one story, and why they spent so much time in one room debating the issues of the day – that was a trifle wearing. Of course I had missed the grand symbolism in the story and I only discovered what I had overlooked when I went back to read the introduction. I always read the introduction last and in this case I am very glad I did, had I known the key whilst I was reading it then the story would have seemed more like a clever exercise that a gripping tale, and that kind of thing does not appeal to me.
There were portions of this story that dragged, for sure, and some parts did just not make sense except to contrive a tidy ending. I got frustrated by the unpleasantness of some character and the insipidity of other. It is a clever story that lacks heart.
I was suppled with a free e-copy of this book by netgalley

This one is really hard to summarise without giving too much away, and that would really ruin some of the enjoyment, but here goes: At the start of The Feast we hear about the Pendizak Manor Hotel, now buried under a collapsed cliff, with seven guests dead. The rest of the book is set in the week running up to that cliff collapse, which happened in the middle of summer 1947. You spend the book getting to know all the people who live and work at the hotel and the ins and outs of their lives. I went through the book wondering whether it was going to turn out to be a thriller, or a tragedy or something else – it’s a complete page-turner. And the characters, oh the characters. Of all of the adults, there’s really only Nancy who is sensible. The hotel is owned by a formerly genteel family fallen on hard times and who have turned the family home into a boarding house to try and make ends meet, and their guests tend to be people Mrs Siddal thinks are the “right sort” – although as you learn about them, you realise that “the right sort” may not be nice people at all…

The Feast was first published in 1949 and this is a new edition with an introduction from Cathy Rentzenbrink. Now I’ve been had by spoilers in introductions before so I deliberately skipped it before I read it so it wouldn’t ruin anything for me and I recommend you do the same because it really repaid me – both in reading the book the first time through and then when I read the introduction in giving me more layers and levels to think about. I read Margaret Kennedy’s more famous book, The Constant Nymph, a couple of years back and could see why it was influential, but didn’t love it – mostly because the characters were annoying but not in a so annoying you want to see them get their comeuppance sort of way – but with this lot, the ones that are annoying are really annoying, and you have the added suspense of whether they’re going to end up under the cliff or not! And on top of everything, the cover for this new edition is gorgeous too. I’m seriously tempted to get myself a physical copy.

I loved this book! It’s funny, clever and moving, with a seaside setting and a rich cast of characters. First published in 1950, the new edition comes with a foreword by Cathy Rentzenbrink.

The Feast begins with a prologue featuring the local vicar speaking to his friend. He explains that a local hotel has collapsed into the sea, leading to the deaths of a number of people. But, aside from the owner, Mr Siddal, he does not give the names of those who died.

The novel proper then goes back to one week before the disaster and introduces a fascinating and varied cast of characters. The hotel was formerly the family home of the Siddals but they have fallen on hard times. Mr Siddal was going to be a lawyer but walked away and lives in a state of perpetual ennui while his long-suffering wife takes paying guests and does all the cooking to pay the school fees of her two younger sons. Meanwhile her eldest son, a doctor, also works himself into the ground to help her.

The guests range from Lady Gifford and her family – who spent the war in exile and demands the best of everything, while still begrudging paying tax – to the Coves, three girls and their widowed mother, to Anna Lechene and Bruce, an aspiring author who is her chauffeur and personal secretary (with the emphasis on personal). At the heart of the story is the wonderful Nancibel, the maid who comes in daily to work at the hotel, who has returned home from war service with some choice language and a strong sense of her own worth.

The eclectic group are thrown together (with only one bathroom between them!) leading to a number of conflicts, romances and reckonings. There is cruelty, kindness, love, pettiness, and one character whose behaviour is quite chilling. No one wakes up on the day of the disaster unchanged. They are all looking forward, whether with joy or dread, to a very different future. But of course, we as readers know they will not all survive.

This gives The Feast great poignancy. As we come to know the residents of the hotel and watch them grow, we become invested in their future. We hope that certain characters will survive (and perhaps that others will not!) but we have to wait to the end to find out.

Beneath the charm and a rich vein of humour there is a very clever structure which asks questions about morality and society – what we owe to others and what we should reserve for ourselves. Mr Siddal – remember, the only one we know isn’t going to make it – offers thoughtful and articulate arguments on the nature of our responsibilities, which have a massive impact on one character in particular. His intelligent and well-argued views are subtly undercut, not only by his failure to follow his own edicts, but by the observation in the narrative that he could just as happily have made the opposite case.

The moral arguments are also interesting in the context of the post-war years. Everyone is preoccupied by making do, hoarding their ration points, wondering whether someone else is getting more than their share. Class barriers are breaking down. Miss Ellis, the housekeeper, insists on taking her meals in the dining room. Nancibel is willing to speak her mind, knowing she could easily find work elsewhere. There is talk of tax and justice and the nature of society.

The feast of the title refers to an event held for the children. The event takes on a magical feel, as the children excitedly prepare, and the adults help out with a mixture of kindness, reluctance and apathy. Coming as it does on the night the hotel collapses, the feast takes on a religious – or perhaps pagan – significance, and I approached it with both hope and trepidation, knowing this was where the story would end.

The Feast is enchanting, and full of lovely subtle touches – Anna is writing a novel based on the Brontës, while the three Cove girls live a rich imaginative life. There are Mr Siddal’s wry observations on the literary fate of Bruce and his predecessors. There's the motif of the seven deadly sins (Rentzenbrink expands on this in the foreword).

Margaret Kennedy is a new name to me but I’m determined now to seek out more of her books.
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I received a copy of The Feast from the publisher via Netgalley.

During the month of August 1947, a huge mass of cliff side had suddenly subsided and obliterated a hotel which once stood on a land. Seven guests died, seven people who obviously commited seven deadly sins.

Hotel guests were varied selection of adults and children, some eccentric, snobbish, mean, envious, the other pure-hearted, helpful, loving and innocent. Always hungry and uncared Cove daughters had only one wish, to have a feast where all hotel guest will be invited. "They had so little, knew so little, had been to few places and met few people, their lives were so entirely bare that they had never learnt to want much."

The plot unwinds, people show their real faces and with every evil deed the cracks on the land seem to widen.

Margaret Kennedy was an outstanding master storyteller, the novel is full of wisdom, humour, philosophical moments and intelligence. The characters are so brilliant and the plot so exciting that I couldn't put the book down.

The novel was first published in 1950, but people and our nature never really change, just time passes. The reader easily relates to all characters and constantly root for all the underdogs, the innocent and oppressed.

As an author says: "That mankind is protected and sustained by undeserved suffering; by all those millions of helpless people who pay for the evil we do and who shield us simply by being there..."

Not only the summer read, it is a timeless classics.

The magnificent feast for the reader.

I'm so happy I read this story because I discovered a great writer.
There's a vibe of Golden Age mystery in this story as it could be the beginning of one of those mysteries set after WWII (I love them).
The author delivers a gripping story, full of humour, and her characters are well thought and represent different type of human being. They're realistic and interesting.
The aftermath and the scars of the war are well described and it's a great depiction of an era.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Human nature can be incredibly humorous at times and the author made the most of it in this book which was originally written in 1950. She wrote about ordinary things people think about but don't always say out loud. It made me giggle several times. The humour and wit are my favourite aspects of the book, including the motley crew of characters. The descriptions are astonishingly well done, making it very easy to visualize the setting and characters. Wow, the writing is clever! Lots of deceit and secrets. I could read books like this all day long.

Following WWII in 1947 Cornwall, the Pendizack Manor was buried under rock. Who were the hotel guests at the time? Read this remarkably funny book to find out. Just thinking about the story makes me chuckle. Each character represents a sin and the characters make internal and external judgements about each other as they gossip and surmise. Or don't as they are not all talkative. You will read about several feasts in the story which tie into the title.

So many brilliant and funny descriptions and amongst my favourites include the walk through the cornfield, the typescript notes for a sermon, minds wandering during a sermon including Sir Gifford noticing a comma in a hymn for the first time, the Spartan Test. the folding bed and metatarsal talk. Oh, how I laughed! Do not skip a single word or you just may miss something.

Those who like extraordinary humour along with strong character emphasis, read this unusual and amusing book. It is such a treat and brought me such joy!

My sincere thank you to Faber and Faber Ltd. and NetGalley for the privilege of reading this hilarious, intelligent and uplifting book! This is exactly my wheelhouse.

It’s the summer of 1947 and a small community has been shaken to its core (literally). Pendizack Manor Hotel has just been obliterated in a landslide, buried beneath the cliffs that once loomed over it. Reverend Bott, who has the unenviable task of writing a funeral sermon for the unrecovered victims, thinks back over what he has heard from the survivors. Through their stories, we revisit the week leading up to the disaster, day by day, watching as the various characters arrive and get to know one another. To some extent, this is the same kind of awkward cheek-by-jowl holiday community of strangers that we see in works such as The Fortnight in September (though that puts a much more positive spin on the experience). Romances blossom; old grudges linger; and plots are hatched, both malicious and benign. But this isn’t just the story of a Cornish summer holiday gone horribly wrong. Kennedy is, in fact, doing something much cleverer and more sophisticated – offering us the chance to solve a very unusual kind of mystery.

The Manor was once a grand house, but the Siddals have fallen on hard times and so they’ve converted their home into a hotel. Mrs Siddal does most of the work, occasionally helped by her generous but least loved son Gerry (her favourites, Robin and Duff, are fairly self-centred). As for Mr Siddal, one barely sees him: he spends his days lounging around in the old boot-room, abdicating all responsibility and avoiding all work. Miss Ellis is nominally the housekeeper, but she’s fed up of the whole lot of them: she’s just biding her time until she finds something better, and spends her time fuming at the way that so many other people seem to coast along in life with opportunities that should have been hers. Fortunately, the kind-hearted maid Nancibel takes up the slack, longing for the day when Miss Ellis really will leave and just let her get on with things.

So much for the staff. The guests, when they arrive, are a motley bunch. First, there’s the Giffords, a wealthy family with a tribe of four children (most adopted), who come with a long list of dietary requirements for Lady Gifford, a self-proclaimed invalid. She can eat only the richest, most luxurious foods – by doctor’s orders, you understand, her poor digestive system being quite unfit for cheap substitutes – and has soon installed herself in bed, where she languishes, showing no sign of moving thereafter. Her relationship with her husband, Sir Henry, is rocky for numerous reasons, chief among which is that he simply won’t agree to move to Guernsey in order to avoid income tax and take advantage of the excellent local cream. Lady Gifford is baffled (‘Why shouldn’t I? I can afford cream. Why shouldn’t I go to live where the cream is?‘). But Sir Henry can’t forget that, while Lady Gifford and the children saw out the war in comfort in America, he experienced the horrors of the Blitz, and now he feels a responsibility towards his countrymen: he can’t just abandon them and head off to live a blissfully luxurious existence under tax-haven skies, no matter how good the cream.

Responsibility for others has never troubled Mrs Cove, who arrives with her three undernourished and threadbare children. She spends her life making do, eking out their daily lives by spending as little as possible and hoarding ration points, always alert to the possibility of being cheated. Her daughters, by contrast, are sweet and loving, and the book’s title derives from their one great desire: to give a grand feast, sharing all that they have with others, inspired by the midnight feasts in their favourite school story, The Madcap of St Monica’s. There are the Paleys, a husband and wife whose marriage has been strained almost beyond endurance by Mr Paley’s superiority and the way he nurses his old grudges, silently, shutting out his long-suffering wife.

There’s the lady writer, Anna Lechene, an old friend of Mr Siddal’s who always has a new young man hanging on her arm. This time it’s Bruce, a would-be writer, who joins the household under the pretence of being her ‘secretary-chauffeur’, hoping that his liaison will smooth his path to publication and useful networking. And, finally, there are the Wraxtons: the red-faced, irascible Canon and his timid daughter, whom he seems to have cowed into incoherence. But holidays bring people together, and offer the possibility of escape from one’s family. Before long, the Cove and Gifford children have formed a gang – the Giffords, naturally, leading the wide-eyed, admiring Coves – and shy Miss Wraxton has founded a friendship with Christina Paley, who turns out to have unexpected reserves of joy, adventurousness and vision.

If you’re like me, you probably skip introductions (lest they spoil the story), but this is one case where it’s really very useful. This Faber & Faber edition has a foreword by Cathy Rentzenbrink and I strongly recommend you read it, because it transforms the book from a story about a doomed seaside holiday into something else entirely. Rentzenbrink tells us that the novel grew out of Kennedy’s idea to write a story in which the Seven Deadly Sins were personified. In essence, this is an updated medieval morality play. Seven of the residents at Pendizack are embodiments of these pernicious vices: gluttony; lust (or lecherousness); sloth; pride; covetousness; envy; and wrath. But which character represents each Sin? Some are easy to identify, but, if you’re having trouble, have a look at the initials of the characters’ surnames: you might find that this gives you a bit of a clue.

I went down a rabbit hole with this, and ended up trying to see if I could also identify characters who correlated to the Seven Heavenly Virtues, the antithesis of the Sins. I succeeded to some extent, although one particular character could come under several headings, but maybe you can help me out. Obviously, there’ll be spoilers ahead for the identity of our Sin characters, so you might want to skip ahead if you want to do that detective work on your own. Now, technically, if the Virtue is paired with the Sin, then we should seek for it nearby. Wrath, for instance, is paired with Patience, which we find in Evangeline Wraxton; Sloth is paired with Diligence, and who is more diligent than the overworked Mrs Siddal? Covetousness is paired with Charity, and that’s manifest in the three Cove children, who are eager to share what little they have with others.

I’m less confident about Humility, which is paired with Pride and should, therefore, be awarded to Mrs Paley; but is she humble? According to Wikipedia, ‘bravery, modesty or reverence’ are also possible embodiments of this virtue, and from that angle I think we’re probably on firmer ground. And then there’s Kindness, the opposite of Envy, and here I don’t think there’s any doubt that we have to look to Nancibel, the generous heart of the household, and the bright mirror of twisted, envious Miss Ellis. We now have only two Virtues left. Gluttony is paired with Temperence, which is presumably Sir Henry – he is indeed humane and fair. But the one that’s really bothering me is the pair of Lust and Chastity. Lust is Anna Lechene, no doubt of that. But who is Chastity? It can’t possibly be Bruce, can it? He doesn’t make much of an effort to resist Anna’s lure, not at first anyway. Perhaps we’re meant to consider him chaste after he leaves Anna’s service and devotes himself to becoming a better man, and worthy of Nancibel? Hmm. And I found myself prodding for other levels of meaning where there were, perhaps, none. Is it significant that the two characters who start going up to the cliffs – setting, if you like, the pattern of salvation for the others – are called Christina and Evangeline? And is it significant that the disaster happens on a Friday? Or is that going too far?!

So you see, this isn’t just a story – if it were, I probably would have enjoyed it less, because so many of the characters were so profoundly unsympathetic, and there were some parts of the narrative which I found rather strange, like Hebe’s unpleasant adventure with Anna. But Kennedy’s concept adds something fresh: it becomes a theological puzzle, a race against time (if the characters only knew it). Of course, it doesn’t have to be read in that way: there’s nothing sententious about it, and the moral allusions are worn lightly. You can simply read the book and marvel at how nasty some of the people are, and hope that they get their come-uppance – for who will end up buried underneath that cliff, and who will be saved? For me, though, the Seven Deadly Sins idea added a fascinating extra layer of meaning, and drew me into an unexpectedly engaging literary game.

Clever, witty and unusual.

For the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2021/05/20/the-feast-1950-margaret-kennedy/