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The Cost of Living
  • Published: 23 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405988766
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $28.99

The Cost of Living

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Discover your new favourite forgotten female classics with the Mermaid collection – No 6: Kathleen Farrell's The Cost of Living with a foreword by Jane Fallon

Idealistic Alexandra is throwing a party to meet a more glamorous crowd. Marianne, more sardonic, worries it’ll be the usual sort.

The party is in Alexandra’s attic flat. Marianne will contribute a few bottles of red optimistically labelled Bordeaux. Can it be judged a success? There’s Donald the bus conductor with high-brow dreams, nervous bespectacled Bernhardt and Marius the ghostwriter. Not to mention a brace of Peters. It’s left to sexy, young Pisa and riotous, middle-aged Mummy (neither invited) to steal the show.

Yet, after the party both Marianne and Alexandra find themselves caught in unexpected – sometimes far from romantic – relationships. Meeting people, it turns out, has the most peculiar consequences.

Is that really the cost of living?
  • Published: 23 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405988766
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $28.99
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About the author

Kathleen Farrell

Kathleen Farrell was born in 1912 into a well-off London family. During the Second World War she served as assistant to the secretary-general of the Labour Party, and after the war’s end, she founded a literary agency. In 1942 she wrote a ghost story with autobiographical elements, but it was in the 1950s that she embarked on a series of novels entertainingly skewering contemporary life and mores. Physically tiny, Farrell nevertheless was determined and outgoing, having a wide circle of literary friends, acquaintances and even one enemy (she belonged to ‘The Lady Novelists' Anti-Elizabeth League’, whose members were united in their disdain for fellow novelist Elizabeth Taylor). She died in 1999.

KF

Praise for The Cost of Living

While writers like Barbara Pym and Jean Rhys have been rediscovered, others, like Farrell, remain lost in the shadows of literature. A distinctive voice, and she provided her readers with subtle pleasures

Guardian

An original and forceful writer

Sunday Times

Real talent. She strikes a cunning balance between lightness and brightness and sensitivity and hidden depths. Her dialogue is very good indeed, packed with character

New Statesman

Real talent. She strikes a cunning balance between lightness and brightness and sensitivity and hidden depths. Her dialogue is very good indeed, packed with character

New Statesman
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