A Room With a View by EM Forster

I’d seen the film, listened to the music, but never read the book. It’s charming, as the young and inexperienced but potentially ‘wonderful’ heroine Lucy Honeychurch discovers herself. She and her cousin Charlotte spend time in a pensione in Florence and meet up with a group of people who become part of their lives – George and Mr Emerson, Mr Beebe the clergyman, Miss Larkin the novelist – and when Lucy returns home and becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, all of these characters play an important part in what happens next. It’s a story about manners and customs and pretensions, beautifully written, with some period moralizing, but with a sort of wonderful, almost languid rhythm that carries you along with the flow of the story.