Showing results by author "Fay Weldon" in All Categories

Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish. Rather the opposite in fact - simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge.

The fantasy of the wronged woman made real: wild funny and true. "The fun grows steadily blacker and wilder." The Guardian When Ruth Pratchett discovers her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy she becomes truly diabolic...

‘Down among the women. What a place to be!’ So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London. Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.

Helen Lally is 22, the stunning daughter of an impoverished artist whose fame and fortune will soon be made. Woe to her for catching the eye of Clifford Wexford, a 35-year-old art dealer, rapaciously ambitious, eminently eligible and careless of all lives but his own. In the space of nine months in the ever-so-swinging '60s, Helen and Clifford meet, fall instantly in love, marry and produce the enchanting Nell. But there the want changes hands, as it will, time and again, in the course of this seductively high-spirited move.

A novel about the perfect pair – or are they? Annette and Spicer make a perfect pair: he thirty-nine, wide-shouldered, square-jawed, and often likened to Harrison Ford; she slight, fair, delicately featured, and sometimes likened to Meryl Streep. He with a son (Jason, eleven) from a previous...

Ten high achieving ladies are gathered together in the week between Christmas and the New Year, at the expensive Castle Spa, seeking, through Botox, aromatherapy and general all round pampering, a new beginning to their lives.

How to be a reader - how to be a writer. All you need to know. Alice is an 18-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen's to her own niece, 'aunt' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only is her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself.

Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations. Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey - peppered with more than a few detours along the way.

In Fay Weldon's 1983 classic, The Life and Loves of a She Devil, women fought men for power and won. In 2017 men take the ultimate step to get their power back. Ruth Patchett, the original 'She Devil,' is now 84 and keen to retire. But who can take up her mantle? Enter Ruth's grandson Tyler, a confident 20-something: beautiful, resentful and unemployed. Tyler won't be satisfied until he can transition into the ultimate symbol of power and status. A woman.

Alexandra Ludd is an actress playing Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In the eyes of the world she has everything a woman could want: husband, home, child, income, good looks, good friends, the plaudits of the crowd and the affection of neighbours. But Alexandra inspires envy as well as love: she was unwise to forget it, she was complacent, perhaps a little vain - and all fate has to do to bring her down is to snip a single strand....

Consider Vivien in November 1922: she is 24 and a spinster. She wears fashionable clothes, but she is plain and - almost worse in those times - intelligent. At nearly six feet tall, she is known unkindly by her family as 'the giantess'. Fortunately Vivien is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic gentleman publisher to marry her. What he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another man's child and will die in childbirth in just a few months....

Waspish, wise, and wickedly witty, this is a collection to treasure forever. Reviewers have been describing Fay Weldon's inimitable voice for years. Now, here is Fay Weldon in her own words, selecting and introducing her favourite short stories from across her career as one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists.

An astonishing novel that probes into the strange world of genetic engineering. Joanna May thought herself unique, indivisible – until one day, to her hideous shock, she discovered herself to be five: though childless she was a mother; though an only child she was surrounded by sisters young...

It’s 2013, and 80-year-old Frances (has-been writer) is sitting on the stairs of No.3 Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, listening to the debt collectors pounding on her front door. From this house she’s witnessed five decades of world history. While she waits for the bailiffs to give up and leave, Frances writes. She writes about the boyfriends she borrowed and the husband she stole from Fay, about her daughters and their children. The problem is that fact and fiction are blurring in Frances’s mind.

"It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring... except a clot of blood, creeping up from Ted's leg to his brain, to kill him as he slept..." Recently widowed Philly keeps dreaming of her dead husband Ted – strange dreams of a paranormal alternate reality: why is her new husband Robbie so interested in them? He works for a mysterious genetic research company called Portal Inc. But what exactly is Robbie's job? Did he seduce Philly by feeding her experimental new drugs? Was Ted's death intended? Such suspicions make Philly doubt her own sanity.

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...

This is the story of the Honourable Guinevere Dilberne, daughter of Arnold, 11th Earl of Dilberne, Sandra Sinclair and Rita Boniface. Yes, that's right. Three parents. Or, in fact, four, if you wish to count Sandra's husband Clive. Though he played little part in it. It all begins with a loving couple, their interfering neighbour, a test tube and a turkey baster. These days, anything can happen....

From the award-winning novelist and writer of Upstairs Downstairs, the third book in a brilliant trilogy about what life was really like for masters and servants before the world of Downton Abbey. England, 1903. Lord Robert and Lady Isobel Dilberne and the entire grand estate, with its hundred...

Walter Matthau stars in the story of a climate scientist trying to balance romance and research. The piece is both serious and surreal as Matthau removes the “fourth wall” while addressing the show’s recording engineer. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Barbara Bain, Zeljko Ivanek and Valerie Landsburg. Directed by Shaun McLoughlin. Recorded before a live audience in Santa Monica, CA in June, 1992.

There's a gathering of high-achieving ladies at the remote and expensive Castle Spa over the 10 days of Christmas and New Year. None of them have met before. Have they no homes to go to? Why have they put their lives on hold? Perhaps they think they've come to seek (through Botox, aromatherapy, and extravagant pampering) a better understanding of their lives?