Helen Simpson

Funny and entertaining, this book of short stories deals with - among other things - time and change. As they chart tantrums, funerals, pregnancy, war and love affairs, these stories unroll with piercing wit and sympathy.

A collection of loosely linked stories about women - at work, at home and on holiday.

‘Full of good jokes, wonderfully alert to irony and the possibilities of Language’ Jonathan Coe

A dark, dazzling, surprisingly funny new collection of stories ("Masterly" 'Adam Mars Jones, The Observer; "A virtuoso performance" 'Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) about single women and wives in various phases of midlife'anxious mothers, besotted mothers, beset mothers'in a (futile) search for security and consolation. Helen Simpson's stories are short but by no means small. One story takes the Iraq war as its subject; another describes a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer; in another, a simple tale of home maintenance'a woman in a conversation with the carpenter replacing her door after a break-in'becomes a deftly sketched study of grief. In still another, Simpson manages the seemingly impossible'producing laughter at terminal illness and untimely death (this might be the first story in which the amputation of a limb provides a happy ending). And finally, the story entitled "Constitutional"'a pun on one of the word's meanings: a walk taken for the benefit of one's health'deals with memory, family, Alzheimer's, oak trees, pregnancy for the over-forties, stolen photographs, and crossword puzzles. Helen Simpson's stories move and disturb us as they light up the human gift for making the best of it'whatever it is. From the Trade Paperback edition.

1 volume ; 18 cm

Poignant, perceptive and dazzling, in this, her long awaited new collection, Helen Simpson offers acute portraits of lives in transition: of changes for the better, lives stalled and in freefall; of love, loss, and sudden revelations.

"A wickedly wry, tender new collection from one of our finest internationally acclaimed short story writers. Nine virtuoso stories that take up the preoccupations and fixations of time's passing and of middle age and that take us from today's London and Berlin to the wild west of the USA and the wilder shores of Mother Russia; stories finely balanced between devastation and optimism. In the title story, long-ago school pals take the London Underground to the end of the Piccadilly line--Cockfosters Station--to retrieve a lost pair of newly prescribed bifocals ("The worst thing about needing glasses is the bumbling," says Julie. "I've turned into a bumbler overnight. Me! I run marathons!"); each station stop prompting reflections on their shared past, present, and possible futures. In "Erewhon," a gender-role flip: after having sex with his wife, who has turned over and instantly fallen asleep, a man lies awake fretting about his body shape, his dissatisfaction with sex, his children, his role in the marriage. In "Kythera," lemon drizzle cake is a mother's ritual preparation for her (now grown) daughter's birthday as she conjures up memories of all the birthday cakes she has made for her, each one more poignant than the last; this new cake becoming a memento mori, an act of love, and a symbol of transformation ... And in "Berlin," a fiftysomething couple on a "Ring package" to Germany spend four evenings watching Wagner's epic, recalling their life together, reckoning with the husband's infidelity, the wife noting the similarity between their marriage and the Ring Cycle itself: "I'm glad I stuck it out but I'd never want to sit through it again.""-- "Helen Simpson's sixth collection of short stories"--