The daughter of Evelyn Waugh purrs into this hilarious and deliciously evil fantasy with: ""Once upon a time there was a little girl called Kate."" Four years old and horrid, Kate Brett has been given a large Victorian doll house. And the Twilight Zone-ish gimmick here, freshly filled out with sheer nastiness, is that Kate's unpleasant fantasies about her doll-house's imaginary inhabitants will actually control the fates of the tenants of a certain derelict Netting Hill Gate boarding-house. If, for instance, Kate muses ""someone would be imprisoned in the attic,"" it's likely that the Netting Hill Gate residents will at some point find a child's corpse in their attic. Among the people whose lives come under Kate's whimsical, meanspirited control: middle-aged Robert and Margery MacDougal, who--thanks to Robert's manic-depressive euphoria, have been forced from the Chelsea Good Life to squatter-dom in Netting Hill Gate; black Princess Lily of Mutendere, who's lingering in the slums while waiting for another coup in her country (and the key to her brother's Belgravia apartment); baby-nurse Pearl, who's handily available when Margery, 46, is surprised by pregnancy; and elderly Harold, who attracts the odd passion of Princess Lily--while his stepdaughter Eleanora fights off a bleak adulthood. . . and Pearl's dog Billy turns (thanks to Kate again) into a dragon. Kate allows her marionettes a few jolly household moments: a christening party, a Christmas dinner. She allows Princess Lily to go to the Royal Wedding--while Eleanor goes to a ""Don't do it, Di!"" disco. But then, wonders Kate, what if fireworks set the house afire. . . ! And, in an epilogue, grownup Kate--still awful--views the house with her fiancÃ‰ and realtor. (""Disgusting!"" she says.) Not for those with tender sensibilities or a lack of whimsical imagination--but a gem of social satire twirling within a playfully Pirandello-esque setting.

Kates House Mmp

Harriet Waugh

Bargain Smart Plug

The whims and cruel fancies of four-year-old Kate, enacted on the inhabitants of her dollhouse, have a profound impact on residents of a rooming house miles away

Kate's House (Coronet Books)

Literature & Fiction

Coronet Books

Mother's footsteps

Magnum Books

<p>"The Chaplet of Pearls" meets twice a year to celebrate the life and work of the all-but-forgotten Victorian novelist Charlotte M. Yonge, led by Katherine Sackville, baroness, ex-headmistress and chairwoman on government commissions. All the members are battling with the demons of old age.</p>

The chaplet of pearls

BLOOMSBURY

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Books by Harriet Waugh