Book description
A wonderful collection on topical themes from the controversial
'product-placement' author of The Bulgari Connection.
A superb new collection of stories: shrewd, sharp, insightful, with a
cheerfully dark view of the world.
The wronged wife remains a lingering presence even after the mistress
has moved in to her home. Oriole, an enormously successful businesswoman
married to the ineffectual Hugh, begins to re-evaluate her life, when
her best crockery keeps mysteriously flying through the air. A sculptor
finds love while protecting a Roman graveyard from property developers.
A Christmas gathering turns murderous for one unhappy guest. A travel
writer watches, horrified, as her father runs of with her best friend,
but is soon planning revenge.
The entire collection is shot through with Weldon's trademark
mischievous deceitfulness, her hidden meanings and agendas. Rich, mad,
greedy, deceitful, vulnerable her characters may be, but the stories
maintain a defiantly optimistic air and sparkle with the irrepressible
wit with which Weldon writes about the lives of modern men and women.
'Short stories that slam doors. Fay Weldon's women make sudden, abrupt,
life-transforming changes: they give up everything, they decamp to the
country, they take up crime, they send men into or out of their lives.
Weldon is a wonderfully inventive scene-setter, making extraordinary
luminous little worlds and strange internal realities. She is funny,
sharp-tongued, gossipy. These are pithy, quirky, explosive little tales
of not quite everyday life where nobody transcends anything or comes out
smelling of roses. Barmy at times, but never dull.' Amanda Mitchison,
Daily Telegraph
'The offspring of Angela Carter, darts barbed and stabbed in the throat
of revenge. Mostly you find yourself in a slipstream, unlike the women
who shore-up these tales and weather tough squalls through life's
emotional, male-strewn path. Weldon is a devoted child of her time and a
serial mother of invention. She merges a quintessential, zappy Sixties
sharpness with the ability to update her feel for the pulse of whatever
is hip or chic or symbolic of each dawning era. Weldon oozes
readability, so unlike the Powers of Boredom that crawl from so many
publishers' lists. She should be cloned.' Tom Adair, Scotsman Fay
Weldon was born in England and raised in New Zealand. She took degrees
in Economics and Psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland
and after a decade of odd jobs and hard times began writing fiction. She
is now well known as novelist, screenwriter and cultural journalist.
