Travels With My Aunt

In Graham Greene's comic novel a staid middle-aged bank manager, newly retired, has his life rearranged by his eccentric, freewheeling elderly aunt Augusta. Henry Pulling has very modest expectations when he agrees to a holiday on the Continent with Aunt Augusta, but the trip turns into something he is, to say the least, not prepared for. Augusta, despite her respectable facade, is not only a bohemian and a libertine, but an arms smuggler and secret agent as well. Their itinerary becomes more and more complicated, leading from London to Istanbul to Paraguay, as Pulling is dragged into a succession of intrigues--discovering, in the process, a shocking secret about his family history. Needless to say, he also finds himself really living for the first time in his stunted life. Greene commented in his memoirs that TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT was the only book he had ever written purely for the fun of it.