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Whether braving speed-dating, running Wandsworth Prison Book Club, attending an American Church that champions the Gospel of Prosperity, or rescuing his daughter from near-rape, Eric finally comes to epitomize the truth of Hemingway's words: 'The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places'.
Lorna, thirty-nine, is married to misanthropic Ralph, who in turn is wedded to his twenty-seven pipes and his artificial-grass business. In fact, it’s a ménage à trios, the third party being Lorna’s Monster, a gleefully sadistic personification of her panic attacks. The Monster has a field day when, after a botched foot operation, Lorna is sent to convalesce among the deaf and demented inmates of a nursing home from hell, where to staff have more problems than the patients. But, despite her surroundings, she begins to blossom, making new friends, discovering untapped talents and even a reawakened interest in sex, thanks to the attentions of an ardent young care-worker. She even gets of...
Five brilliant stories by the popular short story writer and novelist, Wendy Perriam, who is much praised for her story collections, which boldly mix sex, religion and humour.
Three generations of women, all with very different ideas as to what constitutes the good life. For Hanna, 95, it’s always been based on duty, piety, and service to others, but for her granddaughter, Amy, it means wealth success and status. Amy’s mother, Maria, is more ambivalent; attracted by both Hanna’s high ideals and by the new hedonistic lifestyle she encounters when, after the death of her mother, she moves from Hanna’s shabby Northumberland cottage to Amy’s stylish London home. After 39 years of celibacy, her second self – a wild sensualist-in-waiting – is awakened by the passionate artist, Felix, who also encourages her long-dormant artistic talents. But should she say...
‘I like to hear his name, especially when he says it. His voice is rich and dark, like those jams they sell in tiny pots at twice the price of normal jars, and they call “preserves”, to justify the cost. I chose him for his name, in fact – half Mayfair hairdresser and half Vatican incumbent.’ So speaks Nial, a woman with a man’s name, and confused about her gender – uncertain about most things, save her obsession with John-Paul. She shares this obsession with modest Mary and conscientious Bryan. All three lead secret lives. Mary, a conventional housewife with a dream-home in the suburbs, is inflicting burns on her genitals and stockpiling vibrators; Bryan, a mother-harried city...
Purple is the colour of violence, passion, penance and panache; the symbolic shade of kings and emperors, of cardinals and popes. It is also the punch-drunk colour of Wendy Perriam's extraordinary novel which combines outrageous sex with radiant religion, redeems sin with resurrection and capsizes comedy with shock. Thea Morton, the crazed yet childlike heroine, seeks her absent father in every man she meets. Having rejected the kindly, bookish Adrian with his stifling economies and pedantic word-power, she taunts and worships Leo - darkly violent and disturbingly erotic - who lands her in hospital with broken teeth and bloody mouth. Disillusioned with mortal men, she turns to priest and God...
A collection of short-stories in which the mundane goes hand in hand with the miraculous - and even the Queen eats margarine.
The Death of a Child is a collection of a dozen essays in which parents and siblings tell their own stories of losing a child, brother or sister, and of how they have coped with bereavement and grief. Their experiences range from the earliest losses - actress and author Carol Drinkwater's miscarriages, Irish writer Catherine Dunne's still-birth and the death of Sarah Brown's daughter Jennifer at ten days old - right up to campaigner Augusto Odone losing his severely disabled son, Lorenzo, the day after his 30th birthday, or novelist Wendy Perriam coping with the death of her daughter, Pauline, when she was 43. The essays reflect the different causes of bereavement - illness (brief and long-term), accident, and malice. The collection ends with a reflection by the celebrated psychotherapist, Dorothy Rowe, on surviving the loss of a child, and a glossary of useful organisations.
Abandoned by God and her husband, twin totems of her life to date, Morna Gordon embarks on a voyage of discovery, travelling first to California where she undergoes a series of extraordinary experiences, ending up in Disneyland, ‘the happiest place on earth’ – though not for her. Shaken, she flees to a near-deserted island in the Hebrides where David, historian and researcher, is working on the Life of a seventh-century saint. Morna, translator by profession, has to learn, through David and his saint, a new interpretation of the world. Her contribution to his work helps forge a powerful bond between them, and slowly, movingly, and despite the still smarting slap-down of the Catholic Ch...
In this sparkling and ironical study of the complexities of love, Ginny Barnes is wrenched out of her suburban cul-de-sac into a brutal five-star passion and forced to choose between her decaffeinated, low-cholesterol husband Ian and her high-calorie lover Caldos de Roche, a gourmet psychoanalyst who seeks fame and fortune by selling Happiness like hamburgers. De Roche is aiming to transform not only what he sees as his impotent profession, but also once-a-Catholic Ginny, still tied to home and children, and obsessed with guilt and sin. Far from impotent himself, he woos her with heavenly pleasures, combining sacred and profane, making highly unconventional love to a background of church mus...