books in order

Rumer Godden Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Black Narcissus (1939)
  2. The River (1946)
  3. A Candle for St. Jude (1948)
  4. A Breath of Air (1950)
  5. The Mousewife (1951)
  6. Breakfast with the Nikolides (1952)
  7. Mouse House (1952)
  8. Impunity Jane (1954)
  9. An Episode of Sparrows (1955)
  10. The Fairy Doll (1956)
  11. The Greengage Summer (1958)
  12. The Story of Holly and Ivy (1958)
  13. Kingfishers Catch Fire (1959)
  14. Candy Floss (1960)
  15. China Court (1961)
  16. Saint Jerome and the Lion (1961)
  17. Thus Far and No Further (1961)
  18. Doll’s House (1962)
  19. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1963)
  20. Little Plum (1963)
  21. Home is the Sailor (1964)
  22. Gypsy, Gypsy (1965)
  23. Two Under the Indian Sun (1966)
  24. The Kitchen Madonna (1967)
  25. A Fugue in Time (1969)
  26. In This House of Brede (1969)
  27. The Lady And The Unicorn (1969)
  28. Operation Sippacik (1969)
  29. Miss Happiness and Miss Flower (1971)
  30. The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle (1972)
  31. The Diddakoi (1972)
  32. Mr. McFadden’s Hallowe’en (1975)
  33. The Peacock Spring (1975)
  34. The Rocking Horse Secret (1977)
  35. The Butterfly Lions (1978)
  36. A Kindle of Kittens (1978)
  37. Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (1979)
  38. Take Three Tenses (1980)
  39. Gulbadan (1980)
  40. The Dark Horse (1981)
  41. The Dragon of Og (1981)
  42. The Valiant Chatti-Maker (1983)
  43. Four Dolls (1983)
  44. Tottie (1983)
  45. Thursday’s Children (1984)
  46. The Tale Of The Tales (1985)
  47. Fu-Dog (1989)
  48. Coromandel Sea Change (1991)
  49. Great Grandfather’s House (1992)
  50. Listen to the Nightingale (1992)
  51. Pippa Pas*ses (1994)
  52. The Little Chair (1996)
  53. Premlata and the Festival of Lights (1997)
  54. Co*ckcrow To Starlight (1997)
  55. Cromartie Vs the God Shiva (1997)
  56. Gypsy Girl (2002)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. Mooltiki (1957)
  2. Mrs Manders’ Cookbook (1968)
  3. Candy Floss and Impunity Jane (1975)
  4. Mouse Time (1984)
  5. Indian Dust (1989)
  6. Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love (1989)
  7. A Pocket Book of Spiritual Poems (1996)
  8. The Fairy Doll and Other Tales from the Doll’s House (2012)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Hans Christian Andersen (1955)
  2. Raphael Bible (1970)
  3. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (1987)
  4. A House With Four Rooms (1989)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Rumer Godden Books Overview

Black Narcissus

In the days when it was the General’s harem’ palace, ladies with their retinues and rich clothes could be seen walking on the high windy terraces. At night, music floated out over villages and gorges far into the early hours. Now the General’s son has bestowed it upon the disciplined Sisters of Mary. Beginning work in the orchards and opening a school and a dispensary for the mountain people, the small band of Sisters are depended for help on the English agent, Mr Dean. But his charm and insolent candour are disconcerting. When he says bluntly This is no place for a nunnery’, it is as if he already knows their destiny…
Black Narcissus…
bears comparison with A Passage to India ‘ Arthur Koestler A very remarkable novel indeed. One in a thousand’ Observer The writing is lovely, subtle, gentle, humorous and apprehensive’ Hugh Walpole A genius for storytelling’ Evening Standard

The River

Harriet is between two worlds. Her sister is no longer a playmate, her brother is still a child. The comforting rhythm of her Indian childhood the noise of the jute works, the colourful festivals that accompany each season and the eternal ebb and flow of The River on its journey to the Bay of Benghal is about to be shattered. She must learn how to reconcile the jagged edges of beginnings and ends…
‘The River‘ is Rumer Godden’s beautiful tribute to India and childhood, made into a film by Jean Renoir. And in a preface for this novel she explains how the classic tale came to be written. ‘So intense, so quietly demanding of attention, that at the time there will be nothing in your thoughts but a small girl in India, and the people and places that were her world’ ‘Saturday Review’. ‘Compassionate wisdom and serence understanding…
with each book she writes Miss Godden’s position as one of the finest of English novelists becomes more secure’ Orville Prescott.

The Mousewife

Day in and day out the dutiful mousewife works alongside her mousehusband in the house of Miss Barbara Wilkinson. It is a nice house and The Mousewife is for the most part happy collecting crumbs and preparing a nest for her future mouse babies yet she yearns for something more. But what? Her husband, for one, can t imagine. I think about cheese, he advises her. Why don t you think about cheese? Then an odd and exotic new creature, a turtledove, is brought into the house and placed in a gilded cage. A friendship develops as the dove tells The Mousewife about things no house mouse has ever imagined, blue skies, tumbling clouds, tall trees, and far horizons, the memory of which haunt the dove in her captivity. The dove’s tales fill The Mousewife with wonder and inspire her to take daring action. Rumer Godden s lovely fable about unexpected friendship and bittersweet love was inspired by a story Dorothy Wordsworth wrote for her brother, William, and is accompanied by stunning pen and ink drawings by William P ne du Bois.

Breakfast with the Nikolides

Rumer Goddens story is of a family whose relationships with each other are as fragile and complicated as their relationships with India and her people. But just as the cracks and holes in the house they live in are papered over, somehow they manage to sustain the impression of respectability to the outside world. That is until the death of Emilys beloved dog forces them to confront their differences and ultimately plunges them into outright war.

An Episode of Sparrows

Someone has dug up the private garden in the square and taken buckets of dirt, and Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a gang of boys from run down Catford Street must be to blame. But Angela’s sister Olivia isn’t so sure. Olivia wonders why the neighborhood children the ‘sparrows’ she sometimes watches from the window of her house have to be locked out of the garden. Don’t they have a right to enjoy the place, too? But neither Angela nor Olivia has any idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of ‘good, garden earth.’ Still less do they imagine where their investigation of the incident will lead them to a struggling restaurant, a bombed out church, and at the heart of it all, a hidden garden.

The Fairy Doll

Fairy Doll has always been at the top of the Christmas tree, brilliant in her white beaded dress and little silver shoes which Elizabeth is sure were sewn by fairy mice. Elizabeth is the smallest in the family. She is always getting into trouble and her brothers and sisters are forever leaving her out and ordering her around. She’s convinced she s useless. Then Great Grandma gives Fairy Doll to Elizabeth and it isn’t even Christmas! From then on Elizabeth keeps hearing a little Ting! which seems to tell her what to do. Suddenly everything starts going right instead of wrong. Could Fairy Doll be magical?

The Greengage Summer

The faded elegance of Les Oeillets, with its bullet scarred staircase and serene garden bounded by high walls; Eliot, the charming Englishman who became the children’s guardian while their mother lay ill in hospital; sophisticated Mademoiselle Zizi, hotel patronne, and Eliot’s devoted lover; 16 year old Joss, the oldest Grey girl, suddenly, achingly beautiful. And the Marne river flowing silent and slow beyond them all…
They would merge together in a gold green summer of discovery, until the fruit rotted on the trees and cold seeped into their bones…
The Greengage Summer is Rumer Godden’s tense, evocative portrait of love and deceit in the Champagne country of the Marne which became a memorable film starring Kenneth More and Susannah York. In the preface, Rumer Godden explains how it came to be written. ‘An exciting tale, this novel has both charm and atmosphere, and Miss Godden recaptures with an easy unsentimental naturalness the unfocused vision of adolescence’ Evening Standard ‘One of the finest English novelists’ Orville Prescott

The Story of Holly and Ivy

It is the day before Christmas and the toys in Mr Blossom’s shop know it is their last chance to be sold. Holly, a little doll dressed especially for Christmas, wishes hard for her own special child to come and buy her. But the day ends and Holly is left in the window. Early on Christmas morning, a little lost girl finds herself outside the toyshop. Ivy has never had a doll to love. Or a family to love her. When she sees Holly, she knows that this doll is meant for her. And Holly knows that this girl is the one that she was wishing for. But Ivy has no money, and the shop is closed. There will be no Christmas Day for Holly and Ivy will there?

Kingfishers Catch Fire

A powerful novel about idealism and its consequences set in the Himalayas. Set in Kashmir, this is the story of Sophie, a young and idealistic Englishwoman with two young daughters who decides to set up house in a remote Indian Village. She finds a tumbledown house nestled into the foothills of the Himalayas and there plans to live peacefully and frugally and at one with the villagers around her. However, she is blissfully ignorant of the turmoil that her arrival produces with the villagers soon in fierce competition for her patronage. Sophie’s cook is finally prompted to take action and the consequences of his innocent plotting are catastrophic. This is a poignant story of the conflict between idealism and reality which has strong parallels with Rumer Godden’s own life and experiences in the foothills of the Kashmiri Himalaya.

China Court

For more than half a century, Rumer Godden has been known as ‘one of the finest and subtlest writers of our day’ Saturday Review. Now one of her most endearing classics is being reissued for a new generation of readers. China Court is the story of the hours and days of a country house in Wales and five generations of the family who inhabited it.

Doll’s House

Tottie is a loving little wooden doll who lives with her family in a shoebox. The doll family are owned by two sisters, Emily and Charlotte, and are very happy, except for one thing: they long for a proper home. To their delight, their wish comes true when Emily and Charlotte fix up a Victorian dolls’ house just for them. It’s perfect. But then, a new arrival starts to wreak havoc in the dolls’ house. For Marchpane might be a wonderfully beautiful doll, but she is also terribly cruel. And she always gets her own way…

The Battle of the Villa Fiorita

The Villa Fiorita was on Lake Garda in northern Italy. The battle was for Fanny, the children’s mother who had gone there with her lover, Rob Quillet, named as co respondent in her recent divorce. So the children came to get their mother away from him. By the author of ‘Black Narcissus’.

Little Plum

A piercing scream came from the garden. Belinda, inching across the ladder fourteen feet above the garden, froze. She couldn’t go forward. She couldn’t go back. Cold drops came out on her forehead. She swayed. ‘I’m I’m going to fall,’ she said.

Two Under the Indian Sun

This lovely book represents the memories of two little girls, sisters from London who spent five years of their childhoods in the village of Narayanguni where their father was stationed as an agent for a steamship company. It was just after the turn of the century, and daily life in India was much different then than daily life in the English Quaker community to which their parents belonged. It was, they write, ‘a time when everything was clear: each thing was itself, joy was joy, hope was hope.’ ‘We never felt like foreigners,’ they wrote,’ We felt at home, safely held in her India’s large warm embrace, content as we were never to be in our own country. Even as children, we knew it was a wonderful land.’

The Kitchen Madonna

Marta is unhappy. For quietly aloof Gregory and his sister Janet, Marta, with her thick Ukrainian accent, her good cooking, and her stories, is the anchor of the house. Mother and Father, both busy architects, are gone all day and sometimes at night. Marta is always there; and the children, sensing her unhappiness, do not want her to go away. When they find out that Marta desires a good place in the kitchen, nine year old Gregory, with precocious young Janet in tow, sets out to find her a Ukrainian icon in busy, modern London. Master storyteller Rumer Godden deftly brings to life a portrait of a lonely boy discovering the creative power of love.

In This House of Brede

This extraordinarily sensitive and insightful portrait of religious life centers on Philippa Talbot, a highly successful professional woman who leaves her life among the London elite to join a cloistered Benedictine community. In This House of Brede was the basis of a 1975 made for television film starring Diana Rigg.

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower

England is the last place Nona Fells wants to be. No one asked her if she wanted to leave sunny India to live in a chilly English village with her aunt’s family and her cousin, Belinda, just hates her! But when two dainty Japanese dolls arrive at Nona’s doorstep, everything begins to change. Like Nona, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower are lonely and homesick, so Nona decides to build them their own traditional Japanese house. Over time, not only does Nona create a home for the dolls, but one for herself as well. Originally published in 1961, Rumer Godden’s classic story of friendship and being part of a family is now back in print for a new generation of readers to cherish.

The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle

An old folk tale with a moral handed down through the generations and told on hair washing night. There was an old woman who lived in a cozy oast house known to the villagers as the vinegar bottle. The furnishing was sparse, yet homely and adequate, she lived contentedly with her cat, Malt.

The Diddakoi

‘There’s a girt who’s a gypsy. She has rings in her ears and she sometimes comes to school in a little wagon.’Kizzy Lovell is a gypsy girl. She has her gran and her horse, Joe, and she doesn’t need anything else. Then Gran dies, her wagon burns, and Kizzy is left all alone in a community that hates her. Thirty years after its original publication, Rumer Godden’s beloved story of one girl’s courage, and how an entire community learns to celebrate differences is now back in print for a new generation of readers to enjoy.

The Peacock Spring

Una Gwithiam is summoned suddenly with her younger sister Hal, from their English boarding school, to join her father, the diplomat Sir Edward, in New Delhi. Why? No reason is given but soon the secret becomes painfully evident. The author also wrote ‘Black Narcissus’ and ‘A House with Four Rooms’.

The Butterfly Lions

The story of Lootie, a tiny morsel of life ‘looted’ from a Chinese palace at a culmination of the Opium War and given to Queen Victoria, is the starting point of Rumer Godden’s enchanting story of the pekingese…
the breed of dogs which combines the beauty and delicacy of the butterfly with the pride and nobility of the lion. Long greatly prized as the court dogs of the Chinese emperors, they were almost unknown in the West until the 19th C. and their introduction coincided with the reigns of two remarkable women: on one hand, the Dowager Empress of China, Tzu hsi, one of the most fascinating.. and perhaps wicked.. women in history; on the other, Victoria, the young British monarch who was to see her empire grow to rival that of the Chinese. Rumer Godden takes these two very different women and their courts.. the Summer Palace and the Winter Castle.. and around their lives and times weaves a history of the ‘golden coated nimble dogs, ‘as Marco Polo described them. The pekingese were so important in Chinese court and religious life that they recur repeatedly in the decorative arts, in scrolls, ornaments and painting,s and in the legends and literature of China. here Godden has assembled a beautiful collection of illustrations to show the role and evolution of the pekingese down the ages. She also describes the development of the breed in the West, notably through the celebrated Alderbourne kennels, and she describes and illustrates her own and other famous pekingese.

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy

This haunting tale of shame and redemption is the story of Lise Fanshawe, prostitute and brothel manager in postwar Paris, murderer and prisoner, and, finally, a Catholic nun in an order dedicated to serving people on the margins of society. Rumer Godden, author of the masterwork In This House of Brede, tells an inspiring and entirely convincing conversion story that shows how the mercy of God extends to the darkest human places.

Gulbadan

Beautifully illustrated with miniature Indian and Persian paintings, this is the vivid life story of Gulbadan Degam, or Princess Rosebody, and her life in the 16th century Mughal royal family in India. Drawn from her own memoirs and two other chronicles from the time, her keen observations begin as a young girl watching her father ride off with his army to conquer Hindustan and ends with her death at age 80. In between, she describes life in the harem, her pilgrimage to Mecca, and the many battles and close escapes that occured under the reign of three emperors across her remarkable life.

The Dragon of Og

For centuries The Dragon of Og has taken for food two bullocks a month from the lord’s herd, but a new lord declares the custom must end, and so begins a battle of wits.

Coromandel Sea Change

Blaise and Mary arrive at Patna Hall, a hotel on India’s shimmering Coromandel coast, to spend part of their honeymoon. Patna Hall is as beautiful and timeless as India itself, ruled over firmly and wise by proprietor Auntie Sanni. For Mary it feels strangely like home. In a week that will change the young couple’s destiny, election fever grips the Southern Indian state and Mary falls under the spell of the people, the country and Krishnan, godlike candidate for the Root and Flower party…
‘A sense of timelessness reminiscent of E.M. Forster…
social comedy slowly spirals into personal tragedy’ The Times ‘The prose is as simple and luminous as the fantasy it elaborates…
an interlude of exoticism and sensuous pleasure’ Independent On Sunday ‘Sheer enjoyment’ Guardian ‘The miracle of this book is Godden’s genius for storytelling’ Evening Standard

Pippa Pas*ses

Seventeen year old Pippa is one of the many dancers in the Corps de Ballet chosen to go on an Italian tour. In Venice, Pippa catches the eye of Nicolo, a young gondolier. With poignancy and perception, Godden makes Pippa’s unforseen awakening to a more grown up, complex world, vividly alive where innocence can so easily be corrupted and new surroundings and experiences dazzle and contort with their intensity. 4 cassettes.

Premlata and the Festival of Lights

Because her mother had been forced to sell the family’s Diwali lamps to buy rice, Premlata fears that her home will be the only house in the village in darkness during the festive night celebrating the Goddess Kali, until she comes up with an ingenious scheme to bring light and hope to her family.

Mouse Time

Contains ‘The Mousewife’ and ‘Mouse House’. In the first story, a little grey mouse helps a caged dove escape and she herself dreams of freedom. In the second story the search is on for a new house for a growing family of mice.

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