Fabulously funny, sharp and yet also touching and poignant, this semi-autobiographical novel from Nina Stibbe is wonderfully captivating and engaging. Two sisters (aged 11 and 9), conclude that finding their newly divorced mother a man will lead to happiness and turnaround the distinct unwelcome the family received after moving to a new home in 1970.
Stibbe writes in such a way that you feel you are there, in that very moment, helping to plot an often unwittingly devious and destructive strategy. Achingly sad, moving and outrageous in turn, this evocative well observed novel shows how children know more than we think, think more than they should and have the ability to bounce back from adversity time after time.
Just a quick bit of advice; snorts, giggles and guffaws will escape at will, so think carefully before reading in public. ~ Liz Robinson
* * * NOMINATED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR * * *
| Primary Genre | Family Drama |
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* * * NOMINATED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR * * * Man at the Helm, the debut novel from Nina Stibbe - the much-loved author of Love, Nina - is a wildly comic, brilliantly sharp-eyed novel about the horrors of being an attractive divorcée in an English village in the 1970s, and a family's fall from grace . . .My sister and I and our little brother were born (in that order) into a very good situation and apart from the odd new thing life was humdrum and comfortable until an evening in 1970 when my mother listened in to my father's phone call and ended up blowing her nose on a tea towel - a thing she'd only have done in an absolute emergency.Not long after her parents' separation, heralded by an awkward scene involving a wet Daily Telegraph and a pan of cold eggs, nine-year-old Lizzie Vogel, her sister and little brother and their now divorcée mother are packed off to a small, slightly hostile village in the English countryside. Their mother is all alone, only thirty-one years of age, with three young children and a Labrador.
Man at the Helm features in the following genres: Family Drama, Biographies & Autobiographies, Books with reviews by our Reader Review Panel, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, Fiction, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Recommendations, General Fiction, Romance / Relationship Stories
Paperback. Not Available.
Man at the Helm was written by Nina Stibbe and published by Viking an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd
Man at the Helm has 320 pages
