Book description
A girl with a crippling pea-phobia, a woman driven to murderous
rage in an Anger Management Workshop, a wife torn between her dashing
artist-lover and her uptight accountant-husband Â- these are some of
the characters in Wendy Perriam's fifth short-story collection.
Whatever the scenario, Perriam is alive to the raw emotion and
underlying drama in even the most limited of lives, combining the
daily dilemmas of personal relationships with a deeper exploration of
psychological complexities. Many of the stories focus on some triumph
or trauma of the human heart. Thirteen-year-old Kirsty is heartbroken
on account of her father leaving home; Lynn eats her heart out over
the mysterious Indonesians she has invited in off the street; stolid,
suburban Ian undergoes a heart-transplant that not only saves his
life, but changes his whole life and personality. And not forgetting
Brian, the freckled, sandy-haired credit controller who, on his
first-ever trip abroad, loses his heart to sultry Fiorella in
Sorrento. Haunting and humorous by turns, this new collection depicts
a world where happiness and heartache lie perilously close.
"Wendy Perriam's novels have been acclaimed for their
psychological insight and their power to disturb and divert in equal
measure. She has been writing since the age of 5, completing her first
'novel', A Pony At Last, on her 12th birthday. Expelled from her convent
boarding school for heresy, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a stint in advertising and a
variety of more offbeat jobs, ranging from artist's model to carnation
disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having
published 15 novels and written extensively for newspapers and
magazines, she is currently exploring the short-story form and is
already well into her sixth collection. She also appears at literary
festivals, runs creative-writing workA--shops and gives talks to
literary societies, readers' groups and libraries. Wendy feels that her
many conflicting life experiences - strict convent-school discipline and
swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and
motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam - have helped to shape
her as a writer. 'Writing allows me to express my two conflicting sides.
I'm both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised
author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a
straitjacket.'"
