Fay Weldon

"I read my daughter's diaries the other day. Let me share with you. You may think you know pretty much what's going on in your own family. Believe me, you do not. You think truly dreadful things only happen in other countries, other cultures, far away: but they also happen in your own back yard, to the nicest people."--BOOK JACKET.

Fourteen-year-old Henry, wishing to honor his brother Franklin's dying wish, sets out to hike Maine's Mount Katahdin with his best friend and dog. But fate adds another companion--the Cambodian refugee accused of fatally injuring Franklin--and reveals troubles that predate the accident.

Ein paar Powerfrauen verbringen Weihnachten in einem eleganten Wellnessbad. Bei Kaviar und Champagner erzählen sie einander im Whirlpool ihre Lebensgeschichten: Eine Verschwörungstheoretikerin, eine transsexuelle Richterin, eine Expfarrersfrau, die von einem Poltergeist verfolgt wird, eine Psychoanalytikerin, die ihren Ehemann vergiftet hat, eine Manikürespezialistin, die von einem Scheich entführt wurde. Und Phoebe, eine Schriftstellerin in den besten Jahren. Sie ist hier, weil ihr Mann erst das Haus unbewohnbar gemacht hat und dann ans andere Ende der Welt zu seiner kranken Mutter eilen musste - oder hat er anderes vor? Die Damen packen schräge Geschichten voller Ehrgeiz, Eifersucht, Intrigen, Mord und Totschlag aus.

"Hattie has a difficult loving partner, Martyn, an absentee mother, Lallie, and a cynical if attentive grandmother Frances. She tries to do the right and moral thing in a tricky world, and always has. But she now has a baby, Kitty, which makes true morality rather harder to achieve. Somehow, money has to be earned. Into this household comes Agnieszka, from Poland, a domestic paragon. But is she friend or foe? And even if she is foe, and seems likely to bring the domestic world crashing down around their ears, can they afford to let her go? Well, no." "Martyn works for a political magazine, Hattie for a literary agency. At work too integrity is suffering as the need for compromise becomes ever more pressing. And always in the background is Frances, tracing the family and social history which have made Hattie what she is - and not just family and society but the dwelling houses too - and all those girls and women, the au pairs, the child minders, the cleaners who've had a part in making her what she is - and now, finally, Agnieszka who has come to claim a life for herself at Hattie's expense. Will Hattie go to the wall? And poor little Kitty! Or will rescue come?"--Jacket.

Offering wisdom on the subject of female happiness and how to achieve it, Weldon explores what makes women happy, and what we can do to lead more rounded and desirable lives. She also delivers short stories to prove her points.

Trish had been rich and Trish had been poor, and she knew it was better to be rich. But now she was to be poor again...back cover.

Bundel met negentien korte verhalen en een hoorspel, gerangschikt naar vijf thema's.

Een jonge vrouw troggelt een vrouw haar man af, waarop de verlaten vrouw wraak neemt door met haar Jaguar op haar rivale in te rijden.

"From life as a poor unwed mother in London to becoming one of England's best-selling authors and most popular exports, Fay Weldon has crammed more than most into her years. Wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, antifeminist, winer and diner--Fay leads us through her peripatetic life with barely a role she can't illuminate"--Dustjacket.

"This novel tells of Sophia, a thirty-four-year-old film editor living in Soho, and her only living relation (she thinks), her grandmother Felicity, an eighty-three-year-old widow (several times) living in smart Connecticut. Sophia is torn between her delight in her freedom and a nagging desire for the family ties which everyone else grumbles about: casual sex is all very well, but who do you spend Christmas with? Her current bedmate seems to be in love with a glamorous Hollywood film star (not that Sophia cares, of course: she's a New Woman); her mad mother is dead. All she has is Felicity.". "But Felicity is not your average granny. Temperamental, sophisticated, chic (and alarmingly eccentric), she has seen much of life, love and sex and is totally prepared to see more. Even if it is from a twilight home (The Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement) ... Twilight is not at all Felicity's idea of fun; and quite possibly she has more idea of fun than her granddaughter.". "As the two women's stories unravel, the past rears up with all its grimness and irony: but points the way to a future which may redeem them both."--BOOK JACKET.

In this title. 20 stories profile therapists who blithely destroy marriages and family ties, husbands and lovers whose greatest cruelty is their indifference, and clever women navigating the perils and pitfalls of domesticity. Description: vi, 311 p. ; 22 cm. Contents: Tales of wicked women. End of the line -- Run and ask Daddy if he has any more money -- In the Great War (II) -- Not even a blood relation. Tales of wicked men. Wasted lives -- Love amongst the artists -- Leda and the swan. Tales of wicked children. Tale of Timothy Bagshott -- Valediction. From the other side. Through a dustbin, darkly -- A good sound marriage -- Web central. Of love, pain and good cheer. Pains -- A question of timing -- Red on black -- Knock-knock. Going to the therapist. Santa Claus's new clothes -- Baked Alaska -- The pardoner -- Heat haze.

When Alexandra returns from her stint on the London stage as Ibsen's sweet and timid wife Nora to find her real husband mysteriously dead of a heart attack and her female friends ominously invested in smoothing out all the complications of the tragedy, she begins to be suspicious. At first she attributes this to grief, and then to paranoia - perhaps she's simply going crazy? - but the smug managerial tactics of solid Abbie, the fussy, invasive ministrations of the aging but still glamorous Vilna, and the vacant, mournful stalking of plain, pathetic Jenny Linden weave together into a creepy conspiratorial veil between Alexandra and the truth of her own supposedly picture-perfect marriage. She finds herself starting to crack, crank-calling her friends' psychiatrist, attacking people with kitchen chairs and breaking into their houses, searching furiously for evidence to confirm her husband's rampant adultery and her own worst fears.

It's a balmy evening at sedate No. 3 Chalcot Crescent - an evening that heralds the birth of a feminist publishing house amidst a flurry of argument, peace-making and naked dancing.

Splitting swoops with dizzying ease among the conflicting perspectives of a woman whose personality, in the face of her impending divorce, has slivered into a chorus of bickering interior voices, each with its own very distinct tastes and agendas. Ranging from former teen pop star to hapless titled wife, Angelica runs riot over London and its environs, chauffeured by the roguishly handsome Ram - who manages to sleep with all of her selves, sometimes simultaneously. A sharp and funny portrait of divorce, Splitting captures brilliantly the chaotic rhythms of a woman in crisis as it chronicles Angelica's disintegration into a handful of "perforated" personalities. No one writes with shrewder insight about women and that ambiguous and overriding presence in their lives, men, than Fay Weldon. This is a journey rich with her wit, wisdom, and very original narrative power.