A Quiet Life
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'The underrated A Quiet Life is one of the funniest books I have ever read' HILARY MANTEL
'One of the best novelists of her generation' GUARDIAN
Seventeen-year-old Alan can't stand rows. But, though the Second World War has ended, peace hangs by a fine thread at home: his troublesome sister Madge creeps off for night-time liaisons with a German POW; their ineffectual father - broken by the hardships of war and an unhappy marriage can't put food on the table despite the family's middle-class manners.
Meanwhile, his mother pursues her escapist fantasies in romantic novels and love affairs. Obedient, faithful Alan is trapped among them all, the focus of their jibes and resentment, as inexorably the family heads towards disaster.
Beryl Bainbridge's classic early novel is a vintage story of English domestic life, laced with sadness, irony and wicked black humour.
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1934-2010) was born in Liverpool, where she began her adult life working as an actress--an experience she drew on when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, which was adapted into a 1995 film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, and is also available from McNally Editions. Five of her seventeen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which garnered her the nickname "the Booker Bridesmaid"; in 2011, a special Man Booker "Best-of Beryl" Prize was awarded in her honor. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait Memorial Prize, and both Injury Time (1977) and Every Man for Himself (1996) were awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. Also a talented painter, she lived for many years in a house crammed with eccentric Victoriania in London's Camden Town, where visitors were forced to squeeze past the stuffed buffalo in her entrance hall.
More by Beryl Bainbridge
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