Books: Hammock-Perfect

THE BRANDONS — Angela Thirkell —Knopf ($2.50).

Best hammock reading so far this season is The Brandons, a deft tale of pixillated English gentry. Author Thirkell (August Folly, Pomfret Towers) is the at tractive, 49-year-old granddaughter of pre-Raphaelite Painter Burne-Jones, a cousin of ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and of Rudyard Kipling, who tried out many of his Just So Stories on her.

Moved to adoration by scatterbrained, widowed Lavinia Brandon's charm were the vicar, his greensick pupil and his middle-aged churchwarden. That their adoration remained dumb was due to Lavinia's blissful inability to concentrate long enough to hear them out. Nevertheless they could...

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