Maeve Binchy books

I just finished reading two more of Maeve Binchy's novels, Scarlet Feather, a story about two caterers, and the multitude of characters that surround them; and Evening Class, a story about an adult education course in Italian, taught by an Irish woman who had lived in Sicily for 26 years. As always with Binchy's novels, the characters are engaging, realistic, and somehow always related to each other. I love the fact that the characters cross over from one novel to the next without the necessity of having read the novels in the order in which they were written.

For example, the characters of Maud and Simon Mitchell, the twins who appear in so many of Binchy's Dublin-based contemporary novels, are introduced in Scarlet Feather as nine-year-olds. Although their characters are perfectly delightful in the other novels, knowing their background from reading Scarlet Feather just makes their characters even more realistic.

In Evening Class, the character Nora (or Signora as everyone refers to her) had moved to Sicily as a young woman and lived there for 26 years before moving back to Ireland where she found a job teaching Italian to adults two nights a week. This character had also made an appearance in another of Binchy's books, though whether it was Quentin's or Circle of Friends, I can't remember.

Regardless, I'm off to the Amazon web site to look for another Binchy book for my Kindle app on my iPhone. I've exhausted all of the hard copies my mom left me when she last visited. :-)