A wonderful, warm-hearted read about a motherless white girl in South Carolina in the 1960s who, through strange circumstances, finds herself at the home of three black, bee-keeping sisters. It’s an optimistic, life-affirming book, and you learn a lot about bee-keeping in the process. There is a magical quality about this book. I loved it.

Iris Murdoch’s characters are as complicated, as mixed up in their psyches as we are! They’re not always likable, but they are always intriguing. Descriptions of the landscape and buildings which the novel inhabits are both specific and evocative — brilliant, in a word. And her books are wickedly funny, too. The Bell is a good book to start on — it’s relatively short. Murdoch is a philosopher, so the lead character, Michael, does get into religious discussions with himself as he seeks to rationalize his ambivalent sexuality. Other good novels of hers: The Word Child, The Green Knight, and Nuns and Soldiers.