Mr Doubler Begins Again: The best uplifting, funny and feel-good book for 2019
‘A sheer delight – wise and insightful, it will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.’Sunday Times best-selling author Veronica Henry.Not every journey takes you far from home.Baked, mashed, boiled or fried, Mr Doubler knows his potatoes. But the same can’t be said for people. Since he lost his wife, he’s been on his own at Mirth Farm – and that suits Doubler just fine. Crowds are for other people; the only company he needs are his potato plants and his housekeeper, Mrs Millwood, who visits every day.Until the day she doesn’t.With Mrs Millwood missing, Doubler’s routine is plunged into chaos – and, more alone than ever, he begins to worry that he might have lost his way. But could the kindness of strangers be enough to bring him down from the hill?Mr Doubler’s New Beginning is a nostalgic celebration of food, friendship, kindness, and second chances, perfect for fans of Rachel Joyce and Joanna Cannon.
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SENI GLAISTER worked as a bookseller for much of her career before founding WeFiFo, the social dining platform, in 2016. Her first novel, The Museum of Things Left Behind, was published in 2015. She lives on a farm in West Sussex with her husband and children.
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Seni Glaister 2019
Seni Glaister asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008285005
For my inspirational and indispensable mother, Penelope Glaister.
And in memory of
Mary Ann Brailsford 1791 – 1852
Marie Ann Smith 1800 – 1870
John Clarke 1889 – 1980
& the other unsung heroes of the orchards and fields.
Contents
Doubler was the second biggest potato grower in the county. While it was true that his rival grew more potatoes than he did (by a significant margin), Doubler was unperturbed. Doubler’s personal motivation was not quantity but quality, and the mere fact that his adversary had more land than he did had very little to do with their respective skills as potato growers.
Unlike his rival, Doubler was an expert. He understood potatoes in a way that potatoes had rarely been understood. He understood potatoes at least as well, he hoped, as that other potato great John Clarke. Mr Clarke, the infamous grower and breeder of potatoes, was Doubler’s inspiration and Doubler sought his counsel often, asking questions out loud as he walked his land and finding the answers whispered to him each day as he worked on his notes, annotating his day’s findings. Though they’d never met and Clarke himself had been dead for some decades, Doubler found enormous solace in their dialogue.
Recently, Doubler’s experimentation had been going extremely well, and certain that he was close to securing his place in potato-growing history, he now carried within him (sometimes in his heart and sometimes in his stomach) a small, hope-shaped nugget of excitement. Doubler was not an optimistic man by nature, and the knowledge that he might soon take his seat among the most impactful potato growers of all time fuelled Doubler with a thrill of nervous energy, tinged by impatience but darkened by anxiety.
To Doubler, his legacy was everything.
But Doubler’s legacy had attracted some negative attention. The most recent threat had arrived on his doorstep that morning. It had been packaged in a Manila envelope and addressed to him with a white printed label, suggesting a sinister professionalism on the part of the sender. The threat became more ominous still when combined with the two other envelopes, previously received. All three letters came from Peele, the biggest potato grower in the county, and together, this collection of three envelopes, now festering in the dark of the dresser drawer, had transcended from mere correspondence to a systematic campaign. Doubler dwelt on this, and what it might mean to his impending success, as he nervously inspected his land.
A brutal wind had stirred up the icy air from all of the surrounding valleys and had deposited it relentlessly on Mirth Farm, leaving almost everywhere warmer than Doubler’s hilltop home, but despite this, Doubler did not hurry. Heading towards the farmhouse, he walked round the perimeter of the yard, stopping to check the angle of the new security camera and again to rattle the locks on each of the brooding barns. Even in happier days, when his wife had been with him, he had been a cautious man with a nervous disposition, but now, imperilled by this series of recent menaces, he had introduced new layers of watchfulness to his daily inspections of Mirth Farm, and his routine now incorporated a multitude of additional checks, which had quickly become mechanical, as if he’d followed them for as long as he’d followed the seasons.
