"Alice" is a fictional character, the author, Fay Weldon, signs her letters to this nonexistent niece "your aunt Fay" and most of the book reads more like essays than a novel. Sounds ghastly, right? It probably is if you read it at the wrong moment.Like many people who loved this book, I received...
4 StarsThis is one of those books for me - like Robin McKinley's Beauty. It has a special place on my book shelves and I come back to it again and again. Yes, believe it or not this feminist manifesto, revenge fantasy, social satire sits on the same shelf as Robin McKinley. This is a significa...
From the hilarious opening to the satisfying final conflagration, Fay Weldon's Worst Fears is a taut, scathing revelation of the nature of marital intimacy. When Alexandra returns from her stint on the London stage to find her husband mysteriously dead of a heart attack and her female friends omi...
In Wicked Women, a 1997 New York Times Notable Book of Year and her most celebrated collection of stories ever, critically acclaimed Fay Weldon brings her bracing wit to bear on men, love, therapy, marriage, parenting, and the myriad self-deceptions and half-truths that oil the wheels of "civiliz...
Mantrapped is a dazzling new work that continues Fay Weldon’s critically acclaimed memoir, Auto da Fay, and tells the story of a woman down on her luck. Trisha is forty-four and at the end of her rope: creditors are coming and boyfriends have long left. Then, one day, on the stairs above her loca...
There's a Muriel Sparkesque quality to The Heart of the Country which I've felt simmering beneath the surface of a couple of Weldon's other novels, although it isn't always fully articulated. Here, however, you have much of the same interrupted tension, the same subtext of 'let me just tell you w...
When I picked up the book, I instantly painted in my mind a landscape of blood, knives, kalashnikov, fashionistas, conniving wives, erotic love making, bang-bang, intense conversations and cars racing and zipping through dimly lit, deserted streets. Though the story did greet a few elements from ...
Praxis is an interesting book to come back to for many reasons, but as I read it in tandem with Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, the two books worked, rather curiously with no small amount of synchronicity–odd really as the books are about entirely different things, for while Life after Life expl...
I was in need of a light read with some depth to it. 'Splitting" fitted the bill perfectly. The young and beautiful Lady Angelica Rice (nee Lamb) is freshly separated from her husband of eight years, Lord Rice. Holed up in five star comfort at London's Claremont Hotel, (the bill for which is pa...
A provocative view of modern society weaved into a tale of explosive love and, perhaps, even, black magic. Scandalous Eleanor Darcy, wild young wife of a world-famous economist, sketches her vision of Utopia to two journalists, Hugo Vansitart and Valarie Jones. In glorious detail, she describes a...
This book has more errors than any book I can remember reading. The numerous misspellings, awkward sentence structure, and errors of fact litter the pages from beginning to end. Here are just a few:p. 11: "she had spent $100,000 dollars"; "what was $100,000 dollars" (using both the dollar sign an...
Follow Wanda, the tough 1930s radical, her daughter Scarlet, unmarried, pregnant and frightened, and Scarlet's friends -- born victims, snobs, obsessive lovers -- in their absurd, nightmarish, often hilariously awful liaisons.
I'm never really sure why I like Fay Weldon so much, but I really do. (Pretty much everyone in my family feels the same way.) Her narrator-voice reminds us all the time that there are non-rich people in the world, and they're important too, but her books are mostly focused on the rich and beaut...
In this brilliantly witty, caustic yet compassionate novel, Fay Weldon explores the lives of three friends: Majorie, Grace and Chloe, who met as children during the evacuation of waretime London. Their unusual friendship survives despite shared lovers, turbulent marriages, and clamoring children.
The Rules Of Life by Fay Weldon aspires to the feeling of a full-length novel in the guise of a small novella. In less than 30,000 words, we are presented with a science fiction scenario, a society- and even culture-wide ideological and religious shift, a transformation of our approach to death, ...
A new collection of short stories from the glitteringly talented author of The Cloning of Joanna May and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. The people in these stories--mothers, lovers, wives, and betrayers--all must make choices, and they all have something to learn.
Her Ladyship’s wrath had not subsided. She asked Reginald to deliver a letter to Mr Abbot at Pickford’s in Maida Vale. Reginald reported below stairs that she seemed distracted and distressed when she called for him, that she was still in her wrap though it was eleven in the morning, and that it ...
She was also in love with him; he could tell that from the way she would drop her eyes whenever he caught hers, and would stumble over words when replying to anything he said. He only had to make a move and she would look up at him with worshipping eyes and do whatever he wanted, and he could not...
Listen hard enough and it’ll tell you the story of your life. Whether it’s comedy or tragedy depends only upon where you stop, at a good bit or a bad bit. But the heart doesn’t let you stop,’ said Annette on to the tape machine Dr McGregor gave her. ‘It just goes on and on, carrying its owner alo...
The ankle is quite swollen now, or so Lily swears. Though it looks much like his other ankle, both to Jarvis and to Margot. Margot, bending over Jonathon’s foot, brushes against Jarvis by mistake. And a kind of electric shock runs through her from her head to her toe. Does he really not remember ...
Igor let himself in at around six o’clock, as was his custom through the side door of the mews entrance at the back of the house, and up the unused side staircase which Inspector Strachan had insisted on being built when Robert, Earl of Dilberne was Minister of Trade and in danger from Irish terr...
She speaks slightingly of the clergy. She is quite without respect for the Admiral uncle in whose household she was brought up, and to whom therefore she should be grateful. She says she has a large acquaintance of various Admirals; she knows too much about their bickerings and jealousies, and of...
I can imagine the scene in Hunter’s Alley, before NUG realized it was a problem and closed it down, so there was nowhere my family could meet. I bought the house because it was such a pretty place in such a squalid area, of storage warehouses and car-part dumps, and seemed a good investment (thos...
Today a small breeze blew a path through the stifling air and cleared my head to write. I ran out of ink not long after São Sebastião, so I refilled my pen with Mr Reeve’s sepia. I have become rather a good thief, as it happens. I decided that I should write a letter to Michael Kelly, just in cas...
Trisha, the lottery-winner, has somehow managed to lose a fortune and end up sewing on buttons above Kleene Machine. She is soon to swap souls with Peter. Trisha's soul, as we know, is soiled but soft and amiable, her sins more of omission than commission. Such as, forgetting to feed the cat and ...
He was annoyed in general. He had a meeting at the House at eleven, and then was free until five in the evening when Mr Balfour the P.M. ‘wanted a word’ about Curzon. It was an irritating gap in time, and not a ‘word’ Robert looked forward to. George Curzon – pushed rather than jumped – had resig...
Underpinnings The inhabitants of the basement are getting really restless. They keep intruding into my thoughts. Scarlet in particular, of the fiction al ones, is impatient. She has to get to her lover in Costa’s. (I just wrote Castro’s and had to go back and correct it – that’s poor Winter comin...
It was mid-morning and a breeze was blowing, lifting the leaves on the plane trees so their silver undersides flashed like the bellies of trout. There was a similar nervous quality to the sunlight; it slipped down the gleaming onion-shaped domes as if, for today at least, it wanted to go unnotice...
Down here the great hairy willowherb – Epilobium hirsutium – grows, and marsh valerian, and milk parsley, and sometimes – in the month of May — swallowtail butterflies hover and dance. It was a bright, bright afternoon and it was difficult to feel miserable, but they tried. ‘We’re not going to pa...
She was not of the kind to be responsive to the talk of houses – and who would want to be who wished to sleep easy at night? – but she heard enough to feel there was some kind of story here. She’d come with a photographer from House & Garden: they were doing a feature on the past retold, on r...