Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

So very British. That's this novel -- Anglophiles, you'll love it. I was trying to underline very British-sounding sentences but, of course, I got caught up in the story and only remembered once or twice. Here are a few.

And yet there was that fine line across which one might be betrayed into womanish fretting over details...He decided that perhaps he would undertake a brief, manly attempt at carpentry...

...the color seemed incongruous, thought the Major, in a woman who preferred mushroom-brown tweeds. Today's dull burgundy and black blouse and dark green stockings would have rendered her invisible in any mildly wet woodland.

"My dear lady, what is there to fear?" he said. "Except putting the other ladies quite in the shade."

"Oh, it's simple pragmatism, Dad. It's called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable,...then where would we all be?" "On a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground?" suggested the Major.

The Major wished young men wouldn't think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.

The story is about Major Pettigrew who lives in a small British village. He is a widower with one grown son. When the story begins, the Major's brother has just died. He and his brother each have a "Churchill gun," a pair of valuable guns which their father had given them with the dying promise that they would be joined back together as a pair when one of the brothers died. The other main character is Jasmina Ali, a woman of Pakistani background who owns and runs a shop in the village. She, too, has lost her spouse and her nephew is helping her to run the shop, which sounds kind of like a 7-11, a convenience store where they have a little bit of everything but no one does their full shopping there. The Major and Mrs. Ali start to enjoy each others' company. They both love books and they like to talk and spend time with each other. This is a little extraordinary because there is some prejudice against the two of them having a relationship, including from Jasmina's nephew and family. There are several other characters who play a part in the story -- the Major's son, Mrs. Ali's nephew, a young woman who has a child who turns out to be the nephew's, a nice woman in the village who seems like a more perfect match for the Major, and the Lord of the manor in the village. An exciting climax happens when the nephew threatens to kill himself. Everything isn't tied up into a completely happy ending for all concerned, but it definitely is wrapped up well & tidily at the end. I highly recommend this book. I felt it was charming and just a joy to read.