A Touch of Mistletoe (Barbara Comyns)

A bit harder to find than her other books, but A Touch of Mistletoe is my favorite. Here, Comyn's protagonist, Victoria Green, navigates through poverty, love (Oh, Gene!), mental illness, womanhood in a particularly British patriarchy, and the stolid simiplicity of everyday life in the middle of the 20th century. Comyns is also a sly genius when it comes to building spaces and describing interiors. She needs you to know what color a character painted a room and the way that light filtered through a window at any given moment. But she needs you to know it because it happened, not because it was artful.