Something Fresh

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NINA STIBBE A hundred years ago P.G. Wodehouse, now widely regarded as the best comic novelist of the twentieth century, wrote SOMETHING FRESH, the first of his novels set in Blandings Castle. Here resides the dotty Lord Emsworth, who is 'as completely happy as only a fluffy-headed old man with excellent health and a large income can be'; his son, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, who 'had been expelled from Eton for breaking out at night and roaming the streets of Windsor in a false moustache' and their butler, Beach, who had 'acquired a dignified inertia which almost qualified him for inclusion in the vegetable garden'. Featuring a valuable scarab unwittingly acquired from a dyspeptic American billionaire, plus imposters, engagements, broken engagements, elopements, mistaken identities, family spats and shots fired in the dead of night, SOMETHING FRESH is Wodehouse at his glorious best. 'The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are exiled.' Evelyn Waugh