My Friend the Chauffeur by C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

Description

In 1905 the motor car was still a marvel, and no one wrote its romances like C. N. and A. M. Williamson. They had already built a following with The Lightning Conductor when My Friend the Chauffeur was published — a light-hearted tale told by five different narrators in turn, a device that lets the whole party air its opinions.

Ralph Moray, a young Englishman who runs a little English-language newspaper on the French Riviera, plants an advertisement in his own paper offering “an amateur automobilist (English, titled)” to conduct American ladies around Europe. The friend he hopes to rescue — Lord Terence Barrymore, charming, broke, and down on his luck after gambling his fortune — is meant to answer it. Three ladies do: a Denver widow who has bought a Dalmatian estate and its title along with it, her prize pig-tailed daughter Beechy, and her orphaned niece, the quiet Maida Destrey. Terry drives them from Cap Martin over the passes into Italy — Milan and its cathedral, the lakes, Verona, Venice — never saying the car is his own, while a rival prince brings the chase to a head.

Highlights

• Five narrators, each chapter a fresh voice and a fresh joke.
• A tour of fin-de-siècle Italy that makes you want the road maps out.
• Gentle class comedy years before the motor novel became a formula.

About This DodaBooks Edition

All 26 chapters fit inside one fluid EPUB: clean type, an always-ready contents page, and chapter titles that tell you exactly whose story you are reading — ready to download anywhere, read anywhere.