Weldon, Fay Series

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 ominously invested in smoothing out all the complications of the tragedy, she begins to be suspicious. At first she attributes this to grief, then to paranoia. But she soon finds herself starting to crack, crank-calling her friends' psychiatrist, attacking people with kitchen chairs and breaking into their houses, searching furiously for evidence to confirm her husband's rampant adultery and her own worst fears. "A snappy whodunit of the heart....one of Weldon's best novels yet." -- The New York Times Book Review; "With a dash of murder mystery and a wink at Isben's grim tales of ruined marriages, this splendid and spiteful novel shows Fay Weldon to be in as fine form as ever." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer; "A hundred years hence, if people can still read, Weldon's books will likely have the unblunted edge of Jane Austen, an unsentimental Baedeker guide to sexual manners in an ill-mannered age. Fay Weldon breaks taboos like tape at a marathon, and she hasn't stopped running yet." -- Los Angeles Times.

Big Girls Don't Cry

by Fay Weldon

Published 1 September 1998

A 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Big Girls Don't Cry is a darkly comic novel from the critically acclaimed master commentator on the rivalry between men and women. Big Girls Don't Cry is the story of four women who establish a book-publishing house founded on the notion of "getting even."

Splitting

by Fay Weldon

Published 24 April 1995

How many women can you fit into one body? A novel of split personalities.

A marriage, its breakdown, and a perforated heroine: one woman, many faces, many personalities, and more emerging: a crumbling house, and the rooms of that house (which in our dreams are aspects of the self). Any more trauma and it's all over!

Sir Edwin Rice has decided to divorce Lady Angelica, ex-rock star. She has behaved intolerably. He petitions the Court to set him free. Angelica fights back. She is not what he thinks - but then what woman ever is? Angelica takes a job as secretary to her husband's divorce solicitor - only to find one false personality leading to another. How is she to find herself: amongst good wife Angelica, Angel the tart, Jelly the secretary, all-male Ajax, Angela the hopeless - and only one body, albeit a beautiful one, to go round between the lot of them?

Rhode Island Blues

by Fay Weldon

Published 18 September 2000

Weldon on top form; Weldon tackling love, sex, ageing, death; Weldon at her wittiest best; Weldon unparalleled. Sophia is a 34-year-old film editor living in Soho. Her only living relation (she thinks), her grandmother Felicity, is an 83-year-old widow (several times) living in smart Connecticut. Sophia is torn between her delight in her freedom and a nagging desire for the family ties which everyone else grumbles about: casual sex is all very well, but who do you spend Christmas with? Her current bed-mate seems to be in love with a glamorous Hollywood film star (not that Sophia cares, of course: she's a New Woman); her mad mother is dead. All she has is Felicity. But Felicity is not your average granny. Temperamental, sophisticated, chic (and alarmingly eccentric), she has seen much of life, love and sex and is totally prepared to see more. Even if it is from a twilight home (The Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement)...Twilight is not at all Felicity's idea of fun; and quite possibly she has more idea of fun than her granddaughter.
As the two women's stories unravel, the past rears up with all its grimness and irony: but points the way to a future which may redeem them both.

The Bulgari Connection

by Fay Weldon

Published 1 October 2001

This novel set in contemporary London in the glittery world of charity auctions, big business, and high art concerns a wealthy businessman married to a successful young woman, one artist and a portrait for sale, two women wearing Bulgari necklaces, a touch of the supernatural, and big dose of envy.