SOURCE: Hubbard, Kate. “Taste as a Moral Guide.” Spectator 274, no. 8699 (1 April 1995): 36.

In the following review, Hubbard asserts that The Best of Friends includes “all the hallmarks for which Trollope is loved,” including provincial settings, sympathetic characters, rich detail, and humor.

In her last novel, A Spanish Lover, Joanna Trollope transported part of the narrative to Spain, and although she brought her usual thoroughness to bear on Andalucian architecture and cuisine, it wasn't quite the same. So it is with a small sigh of relief that, with The Best of Friends, we find ourselves safely back in Gloucestershire, or ‘Whittingbourne’ to be precise. Trollope has moved away from the picture-book English village of her early novels, and though Whittingbourne is built of the requisite golden stone, it also boasts a sports centre, a super-store and gangs of gormless youths. Trollope is casting her net somewhat wider, geographically and socially...