Mischief (49 page)
Authors: Fay Weldon
“Down among the women. What a place to be!”
Wanda has raised her daughter Scarlet to be as tough and independent as she is. When Scarlet finds herself a single parent at the age of twenty, she is frightened.
Her friends are no happier: Sylvia, a born victim; respectable Jocelyn, hopelessly trapped in her dull, bourgeois existence; Audrey, who finally breaks out of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant, and doomed.
Can these women break the straps of convention and become who they really want to be?
Set in 1970s London, following the lives of a group of friends, this comic and classic novel is about identity, friendship and what happens when women turn on each other.
Down Among the Women
is available
here
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A turbine-driven fantasy of love and revenge, values and morals.
Carmen is sixteen when she catches Bernard Bellamy’s eye. Unfortunately for Carmen, Bernard has just made a deal with the devil: his mortal soul in exchange for the fulfilment of all his desires. And he wants Carmen to be his wife.
Carmen is not so easily swayed, but can she resist all the obstacles – and temptations – the devil can throw at her?
Growing Rich
is available
here
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Elsa, who has not a penny to her name except the scrapings from last week’s pay packet, goes with her rich, 48-year-old friend and employer, Victor, to spend her 19th birthday in the household of his millionaire friend, Hamish.
Elsa’s not really very good at typing, though she tries. Would she do better as a good-time girl? A weekend in the country with her suave new lover and his millionaire rifiends prioves that life and love are both more magical and more murderous than Elsa had ever supposed, and that the sixties are better escaped than returned to…
Little Sisters
is available
here
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A portrait of a woman through time. Controversial, disturbing and witty—Fay Weldon’s most ambitious novel.
Praxis Duveen is a truly modern heroine, buffeted and battered by life, by women and by men, by herself – wry, funny, pretty innocent, knowing – yet surviving. Her story begins in the 1920s in the seaside town of Brighton. When we leave her in the in 1970s, in London, she has become – despite herself – a world-famous women’s leader.
Praxis
is available
here
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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 enough to be her daughters – Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice, the clones of Joanna May.
How will they withstand the shock of first meeting? And what of the avenging Carl, Joanna’s former husband and the clones’ creator: will he take revenge for his wife’s infidelity and destroy her sisters one by one?
The Cloning of Joanna May
is available
here
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A voice beyond the grave provides us with the rules of life, love and laundry.
Gabriella Sumpter is dead. But in 2004, her voice returns, from beyond the grave, to recall the details of what she calls “the course of a selfish and most agreeable life” – her own.
She tells of her long-time lover, Timothy Tovey, and the battles with Janice, his wife... of Stavros, her ‘Greek waiter’... of Walter James, who burns down her house in a fit of jealous pique. And through this tale of loves lost and cast aside, Gabriella tells us the rules of life she has picked up along the way.
The Rules of Life
is available
here
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Named after the exploding cannonball, The Shrapnel Academy houses a mix of truly disparate characters in this eruptive saga by bestselling author Fay Weldon.
On the anniversary of the Eve of the Battle of Waterloo, an assortment of unusual dinner guests gather for what should be a peaceful weekend at a remote country house.
But fate provides a snowstorm, making escape impossible; lust, jealousy, bigotry, chauvinism, and pure greed provide the other essential ingredients for a weekend that erupts into a free-for-all of sex, mutiny, and murder…
The Shrapnel Academy
is available
here
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Beautiful and talented, Alexandra Ludd is a star on the stage in London and a queen at her home in the country. But her husband, the great theatre critic Ned Ludd, has just died of a heart attack and her perfect world is about to fall apart.
In the days between his death and the funeral, Alexandra learns more about her husband than she ever knew in his life and comes face to face with her own blind naïvety. She’s up against good friends and bad rivals, the highs of denial and the lows of her worst fears coming true.
As grief shakes everyone around her, what goes on behind closed doors is fast becoming the talk of the town.
Worst Fears
is available
here
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If you ruled the world, what would you do?
Scandalous Eleanor Darcy, wild young wife of a world-famous economist, sketches her vision of Utopia to two journalists, Hugo Vansitart and Valerie Jones. In glorious detail, she describes an earthly paradise of peace, love and technological progress where sex is plentiful and money does not exist. Such is Eleanor’s charisma that, to their own astonishment, Hugo and Valerie abandon their families to succumb to some erotic impulses of their own.
From the storyteller who is constantly measuring the moral pulse of men and women, Darcy’s Utopia is an uproarious and subversive riff on the age-old battle of the sexes.
Darcy’s Utopia
is available
here
.
