These Foolish Things - Tapa dura

These Foolish Things, a kind of less savage version of Kingsley Amis's unbearably funny novel Ending Up. Moggach's prose is markedly more graceful than Agatha Christie's, her moral world is not dissimilar', The Times .'It is characterisation at which Moggach excels. Her gift is to perceive and describe our confusions about life-and to write with feeling about the continual quest for love and happiness that is part of the human condition', Sunday Times

Dr Ravi Kapoor has reached the end of his tether. He is over-worked and exhausted; his South London hospital is out of funds; and reporters are hounding him about a pensioner, who for three days lay on a trolley in A and E, untended, the blood stiffening on her clothes. Even home life has become impossible, as his father-in-law, a disgusting and difficult old man, has been kicked out of his nursing home and has moved into Ravi's spare bedroom. But then that 'tip top man', his cousin, Sonny, has his brainwave, his 'great eureka'. These Foolish Things is about Dunroamin, a converted guesthouse in Bangalore, where Sonny opens a home for old people. Travel and set-up are inexpensive, staff willing and plentiful - and the British pensionsers can enjoy the hot weather and take mango juice with their gin. Skilfully inter-weaving the stories of the inhabitants of Dunroamin, their characters and their families, Deborah Moggach has created a world in which hilarity is matched with the poignancy of getting old, and comedy with the darker issues of care in the community.