"Alice" is a fictional character, the author, Fay Weldon, signs her letters to this nonexistent niece "your aunt Fay" and most of the book reads more like essays than a novel. Sounds ghastly, right? It probably is if you read it at the wrong moment.Like many people who loved this book, I received...
4 StarsThis is one of those books for me - like Robin McKinley's Beauty. It has a special place on my book shelves and I come back to it again and again. Yes, believe it or not this feminist manifesto, revenge fantasy, social satire sits on the same shelf as Robin McKinley. This is a significa...
There's a Muriel Sparkesque quality to The Heart of the Country which I've felt simmering beneath the surface of a couple of Weldon's other novels, although it isn't always fully articulated. Here, however, you have much of the same interrupted tension, the same subtext of 'let me just tell you w...
When I picked up the book, I instantly painted in my mind a landscape of blood, knives, kalashnikov, fashionistas, conniving wives, erotic love making, bang-bang, intense conversations and cars racing and zipping through dimly lit, deserted streets. Though the story did greet a few elements from ...
Praxis is an interesting book to come back to for many reasons, but as I read it in tandem with Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, the two books worked, rather curiously with no small amount of synchronicity–odd really as the books are about entirely different things, for while Life after Life expl...
I was in need of a light read with some depth to it. 'Splitting" fitted the bill perfectly. The young and beautiful Lady Angelica Rice (nee Lamb) is freshly separated from her husband of eight years, Lord Rice. Holed up in five star comfort at London's Claremont Hotel, (the bill for which is pa...
This book has more errors than any book I can remember reading. The numerous misspellings, awkward sentence structure, and errors of fact litter the pages from beginning to end. Here are just a few:p. 11: "she had spent $100,000 dollars"; "what was $100,000 dollars" (using both the dollar sign an...
I'm never really sure why I like Fay Weldon so much, but I really do. (Pretty much everyone in my family feels the same way.) Her narrator-voice reminds us all the time that there are non-rich people in the world, and they're important too, but her books are mostly focused on the rich and beaut...
The Rules Of Life by Fay Weldon aspires to the feeling of a full-length novel in the guise of a small novella. In less than 30,000 words, we are presented with a science fiction scenario, a society- and even culture-wide ideological and religious shift, a transformation of our approach to death, ...