Virago Harriet Said Bainbridge Beryl

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

В сборник рассказов "Помаши мне на прощанье" вошли некоторые из лучших писательниц поколения. Война традиционно рассматривалась как мужское занятие, но эти истории показывают, что женщины воевали наравне с ними, хотя и совершенно на другом фронте • Здесь война - это не столько прогресс на передовой, сколько ежедневная борьба за сохранение домов, семей и взаимоотношений; за то, чтобы получать удовольствие от опасности и силу от совместного опыта. Эти истории о том, как они прощаются с мужьями, возлюбленными, братьями и сыновьями - и как спустя годы пытаются начать свою жизнь заново. Комичные, стоические, сострадательные, гневные и подрывные, эти индивидуальные голоса привносят человеческое измерение в важные события, которые отражались вокруг них, и каждый из них открывает окно в скрытый ландшафт войны

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 Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naive and withdrawn.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

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

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

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

For the four fraught, mysterious days of her doomed maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic sails towards New York, glittering with luxury, freighted with millionaires and hopefuls • In her labyrinthine passageways are played out the last, secret hours of a small group of passengers, their fate sealed in prose of startling, sublime beauty, as Beryl Bainbridge's haunting masterpiece moves inexorably to its known and terrible end

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

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

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

Harriet is caught between two worlds: her older sister is no longer a playmate, her brother is still a little boy. And the comforting rhythm of her Indian childhood - the sounds of the jute factory, the colourful festivals that accompany each season and the eternal ebb and flow of the river on its journey to the Bay of Bengal - is about to be shattered by a tragic event. Intense, vivid, and with a dark undertow, The River is a poignant portrait of the loss of a young girl's innocence

Intelligent and haunting, with echoes of Brief Encounter, this is a love story by one of the best British writers of the 20th century • During summer games of hide and seek Harriet falls in love with Vesey and his elusive, teasing ways. When he goes to Oxford she cherishes his photograph and waits for a letter that never comes • Years pass and Harriet stifles her dreams; with a husband and daughter, she excels at respectability. But then Vesey reappears and her marriage seems to melt away. Harriet is older, it is much too late, but she is still in love with him