Abacus Every Man For Himself Bainbridge Beryl

This wonderful novel showing Beryl Bainbridge at her darkly comic best - out for the first time as an Abacus paperback • Freda and Brenda spend their days working in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory. A work outing offers promise for Freda and terror from Brenda; passions run high on that chilly day of freedom, and life after the outing never returns to normal. Beryl Bainbridge will dazzle readers in this offbeat, haunting yet hilarious novel

Freda and Brenda are friends spending their days in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory in North London. When a works outing materialises it offers promise for Freda, but terror for Brenda. Unexpected passions run high on the chilly day of liberty and their lives are never the same again. Beryl Bainbridge dazzles readers in this offbeat, haunting yet hilarious novel

It is 1950 and the Liverpool reporatory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan, a story of childhood innocence and loss. Stella has been taken on as assistant stage manager and quickly becomes obsessed with Meredith, the dissolute director. But it is only when the celebrated O'Hara arrives to take the lead, that a different drama unfolds. In it, he and Stella are bound together in a past that neither dares to interpret

Beryl Bainbridge gets better and better...she has succeeded with a daring leap of emphatic imagination in penetrating the minds of Captain Scott and the four men he led to their deaths in Antarctica in 1912 Patrick Skene Catling, Evening Standard • The Birthday Boys is classic Bainbridge - one of her absolute best. It is a fictional account of Captain Robert Scott s 1910 expedition to Antarctica told from the perspectives of five men on the voyage: Scott; Petty Officer Taff Evans; ship s medic Dr Edward Wilson; Lieutenant Henry Bowers; and Captain Lawrence Oates

Wartime Liverpool is a place of ration books and jobs in munitions factories. Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naive and withdrawn. When she meets Ira, a GI, at a neighbour s party she falls in love almost as much with the idea of life as a GI bride as with the man himself. But Nellie and Margo are not so blind

According to Queeney is a masterly evocation of the last years of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain’s greatest Man of Letters. The time is the 1770s and 1780s and Johnson, having completed his life’s major work (he compiled the first ever Dictionary of the English Language) is running an increasingly chaotic life. Torn between his strict morality and his undeclared passion for Mrs Thrale, the wife of an old friend, According to Queeney reveals one of Britain’s most wonderful characters in all his wit and glory. Above all, though, this is a story of love and friendship and brilliantly narrated by Queeney, Mrs Thrale’s daughter, looking back over her life

Когда мастер Джорджи - Джордж Харди, хирург и фотограф - отправляется из холодной убогости викторианского Ливерпуля в жару и блеск Босфора, за ним плетется небольшой караван преданных последователей: Миртл, его обожающая приемная сестра; отставной геолог доктор Поттер; и ассистент фотографа и когда-то пожиратель огня Помпей Джонс. Все они движимы вперед растущей волной смертей и болезней общей и таинственной виной • Сочетая захватывающий дух взгляд на красоту с интуитивным пониманием смертности, в романе "Мастер Джорджи" Берил Бейнбридж раскрывает своего загадочного героя так же нежно и беспощадно, как она раскрывает грязь и страдания войны, и создает роман яркой глубины и необычайной интенсивности • Книга на английском языке • When Master Georgie - George Hardy, surgeon and photographer - sets off from the cold squalor of Victorian Liverpool for the heat and glitter of the Bosphorus to offer his services in the Crimea, there straggles behind him a small caravan of devoted followers; Myrtle, his adoring adoptive sister; lapsed geologist Dr Potter; and photographer's assistant and sometime fire-eater Pompey Jones, all of them driven onwards through a rising tide of death and disease by a shared and mysterious guilt

Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. Reserved, immaculate and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese Internment Camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the Bar - the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son - and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his emotions • How Elisabeth turns into Betty and whether she remains loyal to stolid Filth or is swept up by caddish Veneering, makes for a page-turning plot in a perfect novel which is full of surprises and revelations, as well as the humour and eccentricites for which Jane Gardam's writing is famous

Feckless, unwashed, charming, penurious Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, Trinity College Law student, Irish American with an English Accent, maroon in the ould country and dreaming of dollars and ready women, stumbles from the public house to the pawnbrokers, murmuring delusive enticements in the ear of any girl who'll listen, in delirious search of freedom, wealth, and the recognition he feels is his due. Lyrical and ribald, illuminating, poignant and hugely entertaining, The Ginger Man is a work of authentic comic genius

The one where Mma Makutsi has a love rival • Mma Makutsi's engagement to Phuti Radiphuti has progressed smoothly so far, but suddenly there is trouble in the form of her glamorous, empty-headed rival Violet Sephotho • While solving the amorous problems of her neighbours and clients is where Mma Ramotswe excels, the world of football is decidedly less familiar - however, when the owner of the Kalahari Swoopers comes to the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, she promises to find the traitor among the team's ranks

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

A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches, and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive • Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences. A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written