This joyful, inexhaustibly funny story is P.G. Wodehouse's last and unfinished novel. Sunset at Blandings runs in Wodehouse's text to the end of the sixteenth chapter of a planned twenty-two chapters. But, the book also contains a selection of the author's own working notes, of his first hand-written draft for the book, and of his detailed notes on the final stages of the plot. Here, then, is an opportunity to see at first hand the meticulous craft of the Master.
The author's notes have been selected and edited by Richard Usborne, the acknowledged Wodehouse scholar, who has appended an essay on the novel itself and written a long-awaited, much-needed treatise on the topography of Blandings, for which maps and diagrams have been made Ionicus.
And how is it at Blandings in the end? A niece is incarcerated. Galahad smuggles in her beloved, a penniless artist, to paint the Empress and at last it seems that the senior pig will be hung in the Gallery. The Chancellor of the Exchequer comes to stay, shadowed even on the croquet lawn by an escort from the Yard. And what of Lord Emsworth? He has drawn upon the utmost ounce of his resolution and put a brand new sister to flight, and we take our leave of him - and of Beach and Gally and the others - ringing down the curtain on the happiest of all sagas, in absolute command of his castle.