What is The Enchanted April about, and is it worth reading?

Elizabeth von Arnim was a British-Australian novelist, and The Enchanted April grew out of a month-long holiday she took on the Italian Riviera. Her portrait of Portofino helped make the little resort fashionable, which tells you something about the power of a good book on a wet afternoon in London.

What happens

Lotty Wilkins is a timid young London housewife, unhappily married to a stingy lawyer and starved of beauty and affection. When she sees an advertisement offering a medieval castle on the Italian coast for the month of April, she decides to go, but cannot afford it alone. She persuades Rose Arbuthnot, a devout, similarly dissatisfied acquaintance from their women's club, to share the cost, and they take on two more tenants: Lady Caroline Dester, a beautiful socialite weary of London society and its suitors, and Mrs Fisher, an elderly, snobbish widow who would very much like to be in charge.

The four arrive at the castle, San Salvatore, as near strangers. Over the course of April the place works on them. Old friendships are renewed, new ones form, husbands arrive, misunderstandings are cleared up and affections are rekindled. That is about as much plot as the book needs.

Why it still works

It is genuinely funny. The humour is dry and tongue-in-cheek, full of small witticisms, and it keeps the book from sliding into sentiment.

It is about permission. Underneath the charm is a simple, durable idea: that a change of place, and a little beauty, can change how people see themselves and each other. Anyone who has felt a different person on the second day of a holiday will recognise it.

The setting is the star. The descriptions of the garden and its flowers, wisteria above all, are lush and sensory: the book is a love letter to a place, and it makes you want to go.

Who should read it

• Anyone about to go on holiday, especially to Liguria.
• Anyone who needs a holiday and cannot take one.
• Readers who like Forster's A Room with a View or other gentle comedies of the English abroad.
• Book clubs looking for something warm that still gives plenty to discuss, especially about the four women and how each one changes.

It is less likely to suit readers who want a twisting plot or real peril. Nothing terrible happens. That is the point.

How to read it

Ideally on a terrace, but a Tuesday commute in February will do; that is roughly how Lotty starts. Read it in long, unhurried stretches rather than a few pages at a time, because the book's pleasure is the slow thaw of four people, and it works best when you thaw along with them. If you are travelling to Liguria, save the last third for when you arrive. Then go and stand somewhere with a view of the sea and feel smug.

The adaptations

The novel has been adapted several times: a 1935 American film, a 1991 film that received Academy Award nominations, stage versions and a BBC Radio 4 serial. Watch the 1991 film by all means, but read the book first: the dry humour lives in the narration.