"The complete short stories of Beryl Bainbridge, including the novella Filthy Lucre – written when the author was only 13 years old. Bainbridge's exquisite, devastating skill for skewering characters in all their pomposity, fallibilities, vulnerability and humour, not to mention their capability for cruelty, is fully on display in this collection, accompanied by classic Bainbridge backdrops of seedy hotel rooms, dusty theatres and the twilight zone of lodging houses. Evoking brilliantly their tobacco-tinged era, these stories excavate humanity and showcase Bainbridge's sly turn of phrase, ruthless wit and pitch-black imagination."
"Anne Armstrong shares a squalid room in Dublin with her sister. Then a hasty marriage to John Watson, a former cleric and newly appointed teacher, transports her to a life of almost equal hardship and frustration in South London. There she receives no attention, no love, for Watson dedicates it all to his books.
At last her only pleasure is to provoke her husband – until he puts a stop to her defiance with a gun.
Watson's Apology reconstructs the events leading up to the Stockwell Tragedy, giving a compelling indictment of Victorian marriage."
"Wartime Liverpool is a place of ration books and jobs in munitions factories. Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naïve and withdrawn.
When she meets Ira, a GI, at a neighbour's party, she falls in love as much with the idea of life as a GI bride as with the man himself. But Nellie and Margo are not so blind…"
"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."
"Edward is throwing a dinner party with Binny, his mistress. Aware that she has long been denied those small intimacies that his wife takes for granted - choosing a birthday present for his sister, for example, or sorting his socks - he wants to give her a chance to feel more involved in his life, to socialise with some of his friends (the discreet ones). Things are a little awkward to begin with - a late start and him having to be away by half past ten - but everything seems to be going well. Then some uninvited and rather forceful guests arrive, and it doesn't look like Edward is going to make it home on time..."
"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; 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."
"Paranoid, wilful, lazy, the young Adolf Hitler turns up in Liverpool to stay with his brother Alois and sister-in-law Bridget. Hailed by Alois as a student and an artist, Adolf soon irritates his family beyond measure by his constant sponging and his tendency to get into serious trouble with the English. Surely this is a young man who will never amount to anything"
"Quiet and reliable, Douglas Ashburner has never been much of a womaniser. So when he begins an extra-marital affair with Nina, a bossy, temperamental artist with a penchant for risky sex, he finds adultery a terrible strain. He tells his wife that he needs a rest, so she happily packs him off for a fishing holiday in the Highlands. Only, unknown to her, Douglas is actually flying off to Moscow with Nina, as a guest of the Soviet Artists' Union. It is then that things begin to get very complicated indeed...?"
"It is 1950 and the Liverpool repertory 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 stage 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"
"A brilliantly realised evocation of the thoughts and voices of Captain Scott and the four men with him, who suffered extraordinary hardships before finally dying during their 1912 attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. The Birthday Boys tells story of Scott's doomed expedition through the voices of five men on the voyage. As Scott, Petty Officer Taff Evans, ship's doctor Edward Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Captain Lawrence Oates step forward for their place in the narrative, the reader is gripped by the characters themselves alongside the vividly evoked period."
"Genteel, passive Ann works for the BBC in London and is engaged to a successful academic, fulfilling her snobbish mother's ambitions - more or less - while the Swinging Sixties happen elsewhere, to other people. Then she meets William: snub-nosed and generous, cunning and protean. She is first seduced, then transfixed, as William's past, present and future swirl around her kaleidoscopically, overwhelmingly, and Ann is herself irrevocably, and irreparably, changed"
"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.
Inspired by author Beryl Bainbridge's own experiences working at a London wine-factory in the 1970s, The Bottle Factory Outing examines issues of friendship and consent, making the novel timelier than ever."
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