Beowulf

In a novel whose setting is London during the Blitz, and whose characters are the tenacious common people in crisis, Bryher proves herself as masterful a narrator of recent history as she is of ancient Roman frontiers, the crucial age of the Battle of Hastings, or of the Jacobean twilight. Compassion and humor mingle in this beautifully wrought story of a London neighborhood whose hearth is in the teashop where their lives converge. The book's title as well as the key to its overtones, comes from the teashop's mascot, a plaster bulldog named for Beowulf, the heroic figure of the Anglo-Saxon epic of hardihood and valor.