Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Read Behind the Scenes at the Museum Online
Authors: Kate Atkinson
Synopsis
Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck with three little girls in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster.
Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby's own life. "
Table of Contents
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BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552996181
First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Black Swan edition published 1996
Copyright © Kate Atkinson 1995
Kate Atkinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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What the critics wrote about
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
‘A début novel of astonishing confidence and skill . . . Acutely observant, overflowing with good jokes, it is the work of an author who loves her characters and sets them playing with gleeful energy’
Spectator
‘Good grief, I can hardly believe it – a first novel which actually made me laugh, a first novel written so fluently and wittily that I sailed through it as though blown by an exhilarating wind: a first novel with a touch so light I only felt its truth and sadness after I’d finished it’
Margaret Forster
‘A many-layered account of an ordinary family’s life, written with an extraordinary passion . . . Atkinson’s prose is rich, satisfying and self-assured, but never over-indulgent, and always surprising. Packed with images of bewitching potency, this is an astounding book’
The Times
‘Really comic, really tragic, bracingly unsentimental . . . What a triumph! What a joy!’
Boston Globe
‘Impressive and entertaining . . . Quirky and colourful . . . Overall, it is ambitious and assured, its whimsical nature cloaking a tragic, but delicately rendered, revelation’
Yorkshire Post
‘Remarkable . . . A multigenerational tale of a spectacularly dysfunctional Yorkshire family and one of the funniest works of fiction to come out of Britain in years’
New York Times
‘If you tot up the deaths and other family tragedies in this feisty first novel, it seems almost rude to find it so amusing and delightful . . . anyone who thinks that all the sassy new writing by women is coming from North America should check out this gem from Yorkshire’
Independent on Sunday
‘Beautifully written . . . hers is an irrepressible voice, frank, funny and sad, that will find echoes in all of us . . . Kate Atkinson maintains a pleasing balance between the tragic, the comic and the ridiculous’
Sunday Express
‘A remarkable début novel . . . witty and original . . . this is the start of a long, successful writing career’
Daily Mirror
‘The deceptively naïve tone of Kate Atkinson’s first novel masks an unsettling complexity of vision, its artless depiction of childhood concealing acute feeling . . . the sense of the strain and the trivialities of everyday family life is always vivid . . . precise and powerful images penetrate the light, witty surface of the narrative, suggesting the raw emotion beneath’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Has the best qualities of traditional storytelling’
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘Scoundrels, malcontents, misfits, and cheats. Every family has them, though seldom are they handled with the winsome wit and wisecrackery that make
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
such a smart and funny read’
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
such a smart and funny read’
Washington Times
Also by
KATE ATKINSON
Human Croquet
A multilayered, moving novel about the forest of Arden, a girl who drops in and out of time, and the heartrending mystery of a lost mother.
‘Brilliant and engrossing’
Penelope Fitzgerald
Emotionally Weird
Set in Dundee, this clever, comic novel depicts student life in all its wild chaos, and a girl’s poignant quest for her father.
‘Achingly funny . . . executed with wit and mischief’
Meera Syal
Not the End of the World
Kate Atkinson’s first collection of short stories – playful and profound.
‘Moving and funny, and crammed with incidental wisdom’
Sunday Times
Featuring Jackson Brodie:
Case Histories
The first novel to feature Jackson Brodie, the former police detective, who finds himself investigating three separate cold murder cases in Cambridge, while still haunted by a tragedy in his own past.
‘The best mystery of the decade’
Stephen King
One Good Turn
Jackson Brodie, in Edinburgh during the Festival, is drawn into a vortex of crimes and mysteries, each containing a kernel of the next, like a set of nesting Russian dolls.
‘The most fun I’ve had with a novel this year’
Ian Rankin
When Will There Be Good News?
A six-year-old girl witnesses an appalling crime. Thirty years later, Jackson Brodie is on a fatal journey that will hurtle him into its aftermath.
‘Genius . . . insightful, often funny, life-affirming’
Sunday Telegraph
For Eve and Helen
With thanks to my friend Fiona Robertson
for all her help
BEHIND THE SCENES
AT THE MUSEUM
Kate Atkinson
AT THE MUSEUM
Kate Atkinson
CHAPTER ONE
1951
Conception
I
EXIST
!
I AM CONCEIVED TO THE CHIMES OF MIDNIGHT ON THE
clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall. The clock once belonged to my great-grandmother (a woman called Alice) and its tired chime counts me into the world. I’m begun on the first stroke and finished on the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smith’s Best Bitter he has drunk in the Punch Bowl with his friends, Walter and Bernard Belling. At the moment at which I moved from nothingness into being my mother was pretending to be asleep – as she often does at such moments. My father, however, is made of stern stuff and he didn’t let that put him off.
EXIST
!
I AM CONCEIVED TO THE CHIMES OF MIDNIGHT ON THE
clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall. The clock once belonged to my great-grandmother (a woman called Alice) and its tired chime counts me into the world. I’m begun on the first stroke and finished on the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smith’s Best Bitter he has drunk in the Punch Bowl with his friends, Walter and Bernard Belling. At the moment at which I moved from nothingness into being my mother was pretending to be asleep – as she often does at such moments. My father, however, is made of stern stuff and he didn’t let that put him off.
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