Helen Simpson

With this rich range of unabridged stories we celebrate the very best of contemporary writers and writing.Among others the collections features thriller writer Ruth Rendell, witty William Boyd, the Japanese literary sensation Haruki Murakami, ever-inventive Helen Simpson, and Patrick O'Brien, world-famous for his nautical series.Readers include top British actors Martin Jarvis, Rosalind Ayres and Janet McTeer.

The Australian novelist and playwright Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) published many supernatural short stories. This new edition selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric. Featured stories include: 'An Experiment of the Dead', in which a visitor comes to visit a woman in the condemned cell. 'Good Company', in which a traveller in Italy becomes temporarily possessed of a hitchhiker in her mind. 'Grey Sand and White Sand' is the horrifying story of a landscape artist who sees and paints a different view. 'The Outcast', in which a soldier left for dead in the War takes his revenge on his village. 'The Rite', in which a discontented woman enters a wood, and emerges transformed. Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and studied at Oxford. Her novel Boomerang won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1932. She died from cancer in 1940. Her close friend, the novelist Margaret Kennedy, took charge of Simpson's daughter Clemence during the war while Simpson was in her last illness. Clemence and Simpson both feature in Kennedy's wartime memoir, Where Stands A Winged Sentry, also published by Handheld Press. The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women's Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century.

A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year In these nine virtuoso stories, Helen Simpson turns her wickedly wry wit to the stations of life, the vulnerabilities of age, and the lives of ordinary people in complicated times. The title story follows two old friends as they ride the London Underground to Cockfosters--the end of the line--to retrieve a pair of newly prescribed bifocals. "Erewhon" depicts a reversal of gender roles as a man lies awake in bed fretting about his body shape, his dissatisfaction with sex, his children, and his role in his marriage. And in "Berlin," a fiftysomething couple embarks on a "Ring Cycle package" trip to Germany, recalling the ups and downs of their life together as they make their way through Wagner's epic. Funny, warmhearted, and deeply insightful, these tales brilliantly balance devastation and optimism as only Helen Simpson can.

Welcome to motherhood - a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. Selected from Helen Simpson's short story collections, this title deals with motherhood.

Cockfosters is a funny, frank and forceful story collection dealing with ageing, ambition and the patterns of repetition and renewal found in long friendships and marriages.

Since the 1990 publication of her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Helen Simpson has been hailed as one of the best short story writers at work in the world today.

Poignant, funny and perceptive, Helen Simpson's fifth collection of runs the gamut of emotions and deals with birth, death and everything in between.

A sensational short story collection from Britain's master of the genre. Charting tantrums, funerals, pregnancy and love affairs, these stories unroll with piercing wit and compassion.

Taking tea is one of the quintessentially English occasions, and who is a greater authority on the subject than the sumptuous Ritz London Hotel?

Set against the backdrop of modern-day London, a collection of nine entertaining short stories captures the joys, tribulations, triumphs, and annoyances of domestic life as it explores the worlds of two female teachers exchanging drunken confidences at a small cafT, a teenage poetry lover who resolves to build a future far different from her career-oriented mother, and others. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Helen Simpson's third collection is a bold, honest exploration of the trials and the rewards of motherhood. an exhausted mother longing for adult conversation but whose son unwittingly precludes it; and a teenage girl whose fraught encounter with a harried mum of one brings newfound appreciation for her own capable mother of four.

In this stellar collection of short stories, Helen Simpson explores independence, solitude, marriage, sex and babies with her characteristic blend of comedy and lyricism.

Brilliant, funny and tragic, Four Bare Legs in a Bed is an outstanding and invigorating collection of short stories. From a bed that transforms the lives of a struggling couple to a chorus of midwives telling the dramatic story of a birth, this is a playful, unique set of stories to treasure.