Welcome to Erik Linklater's Poet's Pub. The year is 1929, and you've arrived at an inn in Downish, England. Your fellow travelers include a professor and his charming daughter, two Americans--a businessman and a book collector (or is he?)--a secretive red-haired chambermaid and Lady Porlet, "who had never written anything (for she had rheumatic finger joints) and never read anything (for she had no brains) and never been out of England, for she had no interest in foreign parts."
Overseeing this eclectic group is Saturday Keith, new to the innkeeper position but experienced as a poet, albeit a deservedly underappreciated one. Saturday soon takes to his new task, engaging the guests and composing an expansive, Elizabethan-era menu. "He worked on it as if it had been a sonnet," Linklater writes, "polishing, cutting, dove-tailing, striving for significance in every line."
Like Saturday's "lamb's wool" cocktail, the plot thickens. The poet and the daughter fall in love; the son of Lady Mercy, the inn's owner, is besotted with the chambermaid, who confides she's entangled in a Russian plot; the bartender's secret recipe is missing! A dark and stormy night, a car chase over hill and dale, kidnapping, a stowaway, purloined (bad) poems and revelations of human foibles and quirks propel Linklater's story to its delightful, tidy conclusion. Nancy Pearl offers an affectionate introduction to this classic novel, one of the first books commissioned by Penguin founder Allen Lane. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller