BookFilter: Half-remembered mid-century European chick-lit
April 5, 2015 4:15 PM Subscribe
I'm looking for a book I read as a child in the 1980s. It was about a young married woman who moved to a mountain village with her husband who has had health problems, and their struggle to be happy in a new setting.
It was set in a European country and was likely to be originally written in the language native to that country, as it seemed to be a translation into English.
Unfortunately that's about all I've got...
It was "old-fashioned" at the time, so I think it was written several decades earlier - possibly either written in, or set in, the 1950s-60s.
It was stocked in my small-town Australian library.
Although my memory says it was set in either Switzerland or Germany, I read it about the same time as some books by a Swedish author called Gunnel Beckman, so it's possible that I'd stumbled onto some strangely specific category of Swedish-YA-fiction-translated-into-English.
It appeared to be part of a series, and the family had undergone some type of trauma in a previous book - I believe there was a car crash and/or the woman lost a child. There was reference to her being pregnant at some point.
The husband had either TB or malaria and had been sent away for treatment in the previous book, and the wife fears he will have a relapse.
The woman strikes up a friendship with a curmudgeonly old doctor, but doesn't really fit into village life.
It was very squarely "chick-lit", focusing on family life, and the woman's hopes to keep the good-looking husband happy while grieving and also missing her life in the city.
It was "old-fashioned" at the time, so I think it was written several decades earlier - possibly either written in, or set in, the 1950s-60s.
It was stocked in my small-town Australian library.
Although my memory says it was set in either Switzerland or Germany, I read it about the same time as some books by a Swedish author called Gunnel Beckman, so it's possible that I'd stumbled onto some strangely specific category of Swedish-YA-fiction-translated-into-English.
It appeared to be part of a series, and the family had undergone some type of trauma in a previous book - I believe there was a car crash and/or the woman lost a child. There was reference to her being pregnant at some point.
The husband had either TB or malaria and had been sent away for treatment in the previous book, and the wife fears he will have a relapse.
The woman strikes up a friendship with a curmudgeonly old doctor, but doesn't really fit into village life.
It was very squarely "chick-lit", focusing on family life, and the woman's hopes to keep the good-looking husband happy while grieving and also missing her life in the city.
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posted by poxandplague at 10:32 PM on April 5, 2015