Imperial Blandings An Omnibus

Threats to the Empress of Blandings and thwarted young love almost disrupt the peace of the peace of the Earl of Emsworth in ‘Full Moon’, ‘Pigs Have Wings’ and ‘Service with a Smile’.

Perfect happiness for Lord Emsworth is to listen to the contented night breathing of his medal-winning pig while drooping over the wall of her bijou residence. But so often there is a snake in his Garden of Eden, a crumpled leaf in his bed of roses, a grain of sand in his spiritual spinach. For Blandings is regarded by his formidable sisters as a suitable repository for young women engaged to impecunious—and therefore unbecoming—suitors.

Worse still, a bad baronet and a devious Duke attempt some funny business with the ancestral porker. Add lovelorn or loathsome secretaries, diamonds, millionaires, false names, delinquent boys and a pack of wild aunts and it is not surprising that a series of black frosts fall on the earthly paradise of Blandings. But usually either the Hon. Galahad Threepwood or Lord Ickenham can bring sweetness and light back into the rose garden and save Lord Emsworth’s bacon for him—to almost everyone’s satisfaction ...

‘A great comic writer’
— Douglas Adams in The Guardian

‘He was the cleverest plotter in the business and side-splittingly funny.’
— Susan Hill