Coronet Books
12 total works
A chilling tale that interweaves the post-Watergate world of American politics and the way in which our past indiscretions inevitably catch up with us.
Isabel Acre's journey through life has taken her from the Australian outback via the beds and alleys of Fleet Street and the seamier side of Washington high life to a comfortable home in London, a reputation as a serious journalist, and a husband in the new chore-sharing, child-rearing mould. Suddenly, however, the past which Isabel had thought safely behind her becomes the source of actual physical danger. With frightening ease, the worlds of political intrigue and murderous conspiracy intrude into the cosiness of her domestic life. Whom can she trust? Man? When she reveals to her husband that she long ago had an affair with a young American senator, a man who is now challenging for the Presidential nomination itself, and that her son is the love-child of that affair, even she cannot foresee the consequences. Love got her into the predicament in which she finds herself; but can love now get her out of it?
Rhoda Koenig in New York Magazine, who calls it ". . . a novel of blazingly hot revenge, one that amply illustrates the saying about heaven having no rage like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned."
Or Rosalyn Drexler, who said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, "It affords a scintillating, mindboggling, vicarious thrill for any reader who has ever fantasized dishing out retribution for one wrong or another."
Or Carol E. Rinzler, who wrote on The Washington Post Book World's front page, ". . . what makes this a powerfully funny and oddly powerful book is the energy of the language and of the intellect that conceived it, an energy that vibrates off the pages and that makes SHE-DEVIL as exceptional a book in the remembering as in the reading . . . . a small, mad masterpiece."
A novel of urban deceit and rural passion, of doctors, witches, birth and death.
`Many people dream of country cottages. Liffey dreamed for many years, and saw her dream come true one hot Sunday afternoon, in Somerset, in September... A trap closed around her. The getting of the country cottage, not the wanting - that was the trap.'
Richard and Liffey, a young married couple, follow their dream of moving out of London to a country cottage in the middle of Somerset. Richard continues to live and work in London, coming to stay with Liffey only on weekends.
Pregnant Liffey feels burdened, hampered, at the mercy of these biological impulses beyond her control.
Then there are the odd neighbours, the Tuckers, to reckon with, and the looming shadow of Bella, Richard's lover in London, threatening the rural idyll Liffey had for so long imagined.
With wit and wisdom, Fay Weldon paints a funny and shocking picture of the conflicts within these seemingly conventional lives, conflicts which seem inevitably to stem from the eternal struggle between male and female.
A savagely satirical tale of marital revenge.
Madeleine wants revenge; Madeleine wants to be remembered: Madeleine wants love. Who doesn't? Madeleine is ex-wife and chief persecutor of Jarvis, the architect. Why not? She hates him. Hilary is their daughter, growing fatter and lumpier every day under Madeleine's triumphant care, and witness to the wrongs her mother suffered.
For Jarvis has a clean new life with a clean new wife, Lily, and a nice new baby, Jonathan. The furniture is polished and there is orange juice for breakfast. Jarvis is content, or thinks he is, fending off Madeleine's forays as best he can.
Jarvis has a part-time secretary too - Margot, now the doctor's wife, unremembered from the days of her youth. Margot, unacknowledged wife and mother, accepting, tending, nurturing his children and her own, complaisant in her lot.
Then Madeleine, hurling out her dark reproaches from the other side of violent death, uncovers new familial links in the disruption she creates.
A distillation of our times: eleven short stories from this brilliant contemporary writer.
`Watching Me, Watching You' was Fay Weldon's first collection of short stories. They vary widely in theme, while remaining avowedly feminist, sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, yet always handled with wit, irony and courage. A sense of sisterhood is one of the most important qualities a woman may possess and its loss, as in one particular story, `Alopecia', can bring tragedy. On the other hand, in `Threnody', a women's commune can be gently mocked, and the failings of the leading characters are human rather than masculine.
Fay Weldon's observation is always wonderfully acute and `Watching Me, Watching You' is dominated throughout by her humour and intensity of purpose, giving to these stories a marvellous strength and unity.
PRAXIS is a modern classic: the portrait of a woman set in time, yet timeless. We see her first as the innocent Praxis Duveen, aged five; watch her, as the men in her life come and go, through many drastic changes in fortune and circumstance. Until, from a prison both psychological and real, she emerges as Patty Fletcher, considered as bad as a woman can be and yet her own mistress.