Amanda Craig is a British novelist, short-story writer and critic who has been compared to Dickens, Trollope, Balzac and Evelyn Waugh. As a literary chronicler of contemporary life she has been called a "state of the nation novelist" by Prospect magazine and the Sunday Times, and her interconnected novels often feature strong plots with murder, romance and social satire.
Craig's newest novel is The Three Graces.
At the Guardian she tagged ten books featuring "strong, challenging, intellectually active elderly women." One title on the list:
Aunt Augusta in Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene (1969)Read about the other entries on the list.
This is equally flamboyant, and unlike the author’s doomy Catholic fiction, pure fun thanks to its irrepressible elderly heroine. Its bank manager narrator Henry has led a quiet, respectable life until he meets the septuagenarian Aunt Augusta. She persuades him to accompany her across Europe, and her account of her decidedly racy life leads him to become less prim. “I have never planned anything illegal in my life,” Aunt Augusta tells him. “How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”
--Marshal Zeringue
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