Because Brat’s likeness to Simon is so remarkable, Alec is sure he can teach Brat to impersonate the missing twin, Patrick, and thereby as the elder brother, claim the trust and the estate. Miss Lucy Pym, expert psychologist, is flattered to be invited to lecture there - even if the Olympian splendour of the students leaves her feeling just a little inadequate.

L. Konigsberg's Father's Arcane Daughter, someone approaches a family claiming to be the child who disappeared many years before. He would like to see the place too: this Latchetts, where his twin had grown up in belonging quiet while he had bucketed round the world, all the way from the orphanage to that moment in a London street, belonging nowhere. This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. He has been around the world trying to earn a living in such exotic locations as New Mexico, but has ended up in London, virtually penniless and becomes an easy mark for a chancer like Alec Loding. One of the things that made Brat Farrar such an interesting reading experience (besides horses) is that I was so often unsure about where to put my sympathies, or if I could trust where/with whom I was tempted to put them.The action then moves to London, where to Brat’s astonishment a complete stranger greets him in the street as “Simon”. He was instantly accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son, although other family members did not believe it, and tried to expose him as an impostor. He is familiar with the layout of Latchetts itself, and the village of Clare, and is convinced he can coach Brat on all the background details.

Anyway, they’re all pleased to see him and immediately taken in – except for the twin, Simon, who is rather stand-offish and the last to be convinced that Brat is Patrick. this is the answer to something that has puzzled me for eight years … The fact of Patrick’s suicide.Alec Loding is clearly signalled as homosexual, and the ease and speed with which Brat went with him on their first meeting would be difficult to explain any other way. It is Simon who has the most to lose from Patrick’s reappearance since Simon will no longer be the Ashby heir; the family fortune will revert back to Patrick who is the eldest son. Brat Farrar may be her best book (IMO), although I’d lay odds that The Daughter of Time is her best known.

It would have been a wonderful opportunity to show how they looked alike but different along with a "tipping point" in the plot. It turned out to be a real page turner, so well written that I was wishing for it to go for at least another 300 pages. Alec remembers a great deal about the Ashbys, Latchetts and the village, which will allow him to coach Brat on all of the background details. There are other indications in the text too, such as the old man in Tampico, plus the fact that Brat mentions having “had his first girl” at the Wilson ranch, but says that it “wasn’t half as exciting as working with horses”. A stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, heir to the family’s sizeable fortune.

Unlike Simon, who is rather arrogant and domineering, Brat is a quiet, kind, person, who begins to care for the other Ashbys, particularly Aunt Bee, Eleanor, and Jane. It was she who gave me a copy of Brat Farrar (1949) last year, as part of a lovely package to cheer during lockdown, and I suspect it was me who got my book group to read it.