Books: The Golden Hoax Book

A celebrated author creates her strangest fiction

The trouble with Jane Somers' first novel, The Diary of a Good Neighbor, was not that it was poorly reviewed but that it was scarcely reviewed at all. The few critics who noticed the book liked it, but Somers, identified on the book jacket as the pseudonym of a "well-known English woman journalist," drew modest attention in Britain and the U.S. A sequel, If the Old Could . . ., published early this year, would probably have found its way to a remainder bin if the real author had not revealed herself last week. The...

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