‘Poundland and Prejudice’: book titles tweaked for straitened times

In Competition No. 3254, you were invited to tweak a well-known book title to reflect the straitened times we live in and provide an extract. Honourable mentions, in a closely contested week, go to Mark Ambrose’s To Grill a Mockingbird, David Silverman’s The Great Gas Bill and to a trio of Alice’s Adventures in Poundlands (John O’Byrne, Celia Jordan and Richard Spencer).

The prize-winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

Here it was, Guesthouse du Lac, an unexpectedly wearying half-hour walk from the Lowestoft seafront. ‘Guesthouse’ struck Edith as a rather grandiose appellation; bed and breakfast, with its suggestion of the exhausted yet somehow uncomfortable slumber following a journey and dangerously fried food, might have been more apposite. A creased postcard of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Landscape with Mountain Lake’, incongruously affixed to the pinboard in its subfusc hallway, strained to justify the latter part of its name. This, Edith reflected, unpacking her few grey skirts and secretarial blouses, was what she could afford.