Winner of the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, and a popular source for radio and film adaptations, Stella Gibbons's 1932 classic is a wickedly funny answer to the excesses of overwrought rural dramas so popular in Britain at the time. The recently orphaned socialite Flora Poste moves in with her gloomy country cousins, the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and the delight of the story is the way she approaches their vast difference of temperament. Upon discovering an entire farm full of people wallowing in chronic self-defeating misery, the brisk, cheerful Flora simply makes them stop it. Gibbons's language is delightful, peppered with a mad gibberish of Sussex bucolicisms.