Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide: A Collection of Short Stories
A wonderful collection on topical themes from the controversial ‘product-placement’ author of The Bulgari Connection.
A superb new collection of stories: shrewd, sharp, insightful, with a cheerfully dark view of the world.
The wronged wife remains a lingering presence even after the mistress has moved in to her home. Oriole, an enormously successful businesswoman married to the ineffectual Hugh, begins to re-evaluate her life, when her best crockery keeps mysteriously flying through the air. A sculptor finds love while protecting a Roman graveyard from property developers. A Christmas gathering turns murderous for one unhappy guest. A travel writer watches, horrified, as her father runs of with her best friend, but is soon planning revenge.
The entire collection is shot through with Weldon’s trademark mischievous deceitfulness, her hidden meanings and agendas. Rich, mad, greedy, deceitful, vulnerable her characters may be, but the stories maintain a defiantly optimistic air and sparkle with the irrepressible wit with which Weldon writes about the lives of modern men and women.
'Short stories that slam doors. Fay Weldon's women make sudden, abrupt, life-transforming changes: they give up everything, they decamp to the country, they take up crime, they send men into or out of their lives. Weldon is a wonderfully inventive scene-setter, making extraordinary luminous little worlds and strange internal realities. She is funny, sharp-tongued, gossipy. These are pithy, quirky, explosive little tales of not quite everyday life where nobody transcends anything or comes out smelling of roses. Barmy at times, but never dull.' Amanda Mitchison, Daily Telegraph -
'The offspring of Angela Carter, darts barbed and stabbed in the throat of revenge. Mostly you find yourself in a slipstream, unlike the women who shore-up these tales and weather tough squalls through life's emotional, male-strewn path. Weldon is a devoted child of her time and a serial mother of invention. She merges a quintessential, zappy Sixties sharpness with the ability to update her feel for the pulse of whatever is hip or chic or symbolic of each dawning era. Weldon oozes readability, so unlike the Powers of Boredom that crawl from so many publishers' lists. She should be cloned.' Tom Adair, Scotsman -
4thestatebooks