Darling: A razor-sharp, gloriously funny retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love

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She knows she doesn't want to marry 'a man who looks like a pudding', as her good and dull sister Louisa has done, and marries the flashy, handsome son of a UKIP peer instead. It was like being invited into a family, one that has their own idiosyncrasies, language, and being let in on their inside jokes as they make fun of people. The plot remains very much the same; Knight has taken few liberties, but has recast the beloved characters and story in a modern mould.

The story just sailed along, and I really enjoyed being in the company of the Radletts as silly as they all were. She was awarded an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read Modern Languages from 1984-1987, before starting her career in journalism.You can almost feel Knight giggling as she invents a new lexicon for the Radletts: “If people were short – all the Radletts were long-limbed and rangy and viewed short people with fascination and envy (‘It must be so cosy to be short,’ Linda said) – we’d say they were ‘still growing’, even if they were adults: ‘What’s she like? But she rents her own flat in Paris - actually, she rents the one that Nancy Mitford lived in for many years in the rue Monsieur - rather than have Fabrice pay for it all.

Knight also takes a gleeful magnifying glass to the hypocrisies of modern life, from rigorous dieter Blanche going to restaurants solely for social media content, to Christian making Linda do all the housework, because paying a cleaner is “immoral”. The latest, much-anticipated addition to the Mitford shelves is journalist India Knight’s Darling, a modern re-telling of The Pursuit of Love. But Darling is a treat, with whip-smart dialogue, larger-than- life characters, witty observations and a heart-breaking twist .Trouble is, Linda’s lived a very sheltered life and tends to see the best in people, even when people aren’t being their best. Linda’s strict, former rock star father terrifies any potential suitors away, while her bohemian mother, wafting around in silver jewellery, answers Linda’s urgent questions about love with upsettingly vivid allusions to animal husbandry. Mitford never wrote a really good marriage (Fanny’s husband, in Pursuit and sequels, is the very definition of a nonentity), and it’s tempting to wonder whether she ever could. Like most clever people, I’m not over-fussed about clothing; there have been numerous studies showing that successful types – unless they’re in entertainment, showbiz or fashion itself, obvs – tend to wear the same thing every day. Darling is a wonderfully escapist caper of a read that will sweep you up into Linda’s world as she navigates it all in the pursuit of that epic love that is always just out of reach.

Knight’s characters are sparky and fun, and in some cases their relationships are crafted with more care than in Mitford’s original. This book was apparently a retelling of ‘The Pursuit of Love’, which I hadn’t read and didn’t even know about when picking this up. It’s easy to dismiss the domestic, but if home is where the heart is, the heart is where all humanity happens. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. The only thing I really disliked was the character of Davey - Knight has made him even more of a hypochondriac than in the original, and, while every bit as loving and caring as before, he can't open his mouth without mentioning his health in some way or another.There always seems to be another volume of collected letters, or a gorgeous edition, or a biography coming out; the most recent was Laura Thompson’s 2016 group study The Six. Delight the bookworm in your life with the gift of this hilarious and heartbreaking modern-day adaptation of Nancy Mitford's classic, The Pursuit of Happiness. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Darling, it must be said, is all the better for Matthew and Sadie’s delight in one another: it makes the characters make sense. Matthew is a retired rockstar, Sadie is his earth mother wife – and they home school their children – and Franny.