Kirjahaku

'Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater Had a wife and couldn't keep her...'In this extraordinary, semi-autobiographical novel, Penelope Mortimer depicts a married woman's breakdown in 1960s London. With three husbands in her past, one in her present and a numberless army of children, Mrs Armitage is astonished to find herself collapsing one day in Harrods. Strange, unsettling and shot through with black comedy, this is a moving account of one woman's realisation that marriage and family life may not, after all, offer all the answers to the problems of living.

... marvellous skill - a writer who can knock spots off most of her contemporaries. - The Guardian A tragi-comedy published in 1971 that looks at the experience of a woman escaping a broken marriage and trying to make a new home for grown-up children who no longer need her. Dealing with themes of abandonment, loneliness, liberation and love, Eleanor's emotional journey is often raw and dark, but at times funny and uplifting as she grapples with her newfound singledom under the critical eyes of her mother and mother-in-law, and the selfish attitudes of various suitors. Perfectly capturing the tone of the 70s, and the reality faced by so many women when forced to re-assess their roles as wife and mother.

The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist's couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.

Penelope Mortimer's only collection of short stories. A mother and her young son arrive at a rental house in rural France only to find themselves locked out; a fractious family of 5 try and get through a Saturday at home together; a publisher with a penchant for parties reconnects with an old acquaintance who's the life and soul; and a woman in a maternity ward is an unwitting witness to a disturbing drama behind the hospital curtains next to her. Sharp, unsettling, and darkly humourous 'Saturday Lunch with the Brownings' is fiction drawn from life that unerringly captures the complexities and cruelties of family dynamics.

A peakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion--"her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel" (Rachel Cooke, The Observer) A bourgeois housewife, Ruth Whiting, is "paralysed by triviality," measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and pidge parties--routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. When Angela finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, Ruth realizes that she has to do everything in her power to stop her daughter from sleepwalking into a life like her own. First published in 1958, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with its "feminine rage" (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a mother and daughter who must join forces in a man's world.