The latest addition to my website is Rosemary Tonks‘s The Bloater. This is a quirky comedy of manners. The heroine/narrator is Min who is married to George, with whom she hardly seems to have any contact. She is pursued by a much older man whom she prefers to keep as a friend and, during the course of the book starts a sort of affair with a man more her age. However she and her husband have an itinerant lodger, Carlos, an opera singer who travels around Europe and whom she nicknames The Bloater because of his size, with whom she has a love-hate relationship. She likes him. She dislikes him. She enjoys his company. He infuriates her. He clearly thinks he is God’s gift to women Towards the end he will invite her to the opera but, by now,she has fallen for the younger man and things do not go terribly well. It is not great literature but it is certainly an enjoyable tale with lively, colourful characters and a glimpse of a certain side of London in the late 1960s.