If the hustle and bustle and toxic consumerism of the holiday season has tarnished your enthusiasm, British author Arnold Bennett's essay collection The Feast of St. Friend is just the restorative balm you need. In a series of thoughtful meditations, Bennett reflects on the true meaning of Christmas and its deep spiritual significance.

The Feast of St. Friend is a sentimental contemplation on the meaning of Christmas, the Christmas spirit, and why the celebration of Christmas and the season of goodwill are important in modern, hectic times. Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as the theatre, journalism, propaganda and films. His best known works include novels The Grand Babylon Hotel and A Man from the North, the self-help book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day and a Christmas book The Feast of St Friend.

A Yuletide dinner in West Brompton should have been a festive occasion, until the host, wealthy Stephen Whitfield, dropped dead before the second course. Now Mrs. Jeffries and the busy sleuths must rally in support of their Inspector?especially since the clues are harder to find than a silver sixpence in a plum pudding.

"Kennedy is not only a romantic but an anarchist." —Anita Brookner Summer, 1947. A bizarre catastrophe rocks a seaside village in Cornwall when a cliff tumbles down on the Pendizack Manor Hotel. The hotel is obliterated, and seven guests are killed in the disaster. Everyone else makes a narrow escape. As the survivors tell their stories, the events of the previous week are revealed, and a parade of sins exposed. Gluttony, Lecherousness, Sloth, Pride, Covetousness, Envy and Wrath: all are in residence at Pendizack Manor, and as the day of the disaster creeps closer, it becomes clear that who’s spared and who’s lost might not be as arbitrary as first assumed. A modern upstairs-downstairs comedy with an old-fashioned morality play tucked away inside, The Feast is sly, kaleidoscopic, and utterly ingenious, a novel that only Margaret Kennedy could have written.