Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is a wonderfully nuanced portrait of English village life, full of delightful characters and surprises. This is the best novel I’ve read this year and may be destined to make my top ten list. The well designed plot is pulled together with carefully crafted writing. I’m embarrassed to be so enthusiastic about it because it is actually a romance novel which is a genre I usually steer clear of.

The world is full of small ignorances. We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small.. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand: A Novel" by Helen Simonson is a work of fiction and the author's debut novel. The story details the life of Major Ernest Pettigrew, a 68 year old widower living in Edgecomb St. Mary, a rural village located in Sussex, England.Both The Major & Mrs. Ali have recently lost spouses and are finding their way through grief. The book opens with another loss for The Major, his only brother Bernie. To complicate this sense of loss, the brothers held separately a pair of valuable guns inherited from their father. The Major thought these were willed to him, Bernie’s family wants the cash Bernie’s gun would bring. This is almost more unbearable a loss to The Major than that of his brother.

There were similar problems with the plot: There were several scenes where I thought, "Oh, BS. The author has no idea about this." A lot of the gun stuff, specifically, and people's behavior at a hunt, was simply not credible. When retired Major Pettigrew strikes up an unlikely friendship with Mrs. Ali, the Pakistani village shopkeeper, he is drawn out of his regimented world and forced to confront the realities of life in the twenty-first century. Brought together by a shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship on the cusp of blossoming into something more. But although the Major was actually born in Lahore, and Mrs. Ali was born in Cambridge, village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as a permanent foreigner. The Major has always taken special pride in the village, but will he be forced to choose between the place he calls home and a future with Mrs. Ali?For Major Pettigrew, the Churchills represent societal standing and achievement, as well as an important part of his family’s history. However, as events unfold, the Major begins to question whether loyalty and honor are more important than material objects and social status. Discuss the evolving importance of the guns to the Major, as well as the challenge of passing down important objects, and values, to younger generations. I am positive that my enjoyment of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is largely due to the fine narration of the audiobook by Peter Altschuler. He gives Major Pettigrew just the right tone of proper brusqueness without diminishing the importance of the other characters. His ability to distinguish each allowing his/her own voice is proof of his expertise. It is a story of finding love at any age, and the importance of discovering common ground and seeing beyond our petty differences. This book touches on so many aspects of life that there seems to be something for just about anyone – obligation, loyalty, integrity, grief, loss, jealousy, and love. Parent-child relationships and differences in the generations are explored in a humorous, and sometimes poignant, manner. It gently skewers British small-town social conventions and American cultural insensitivities. My only complaint is that the ending is unexpectedly quite different in tone and pace than the rest of the book.