Product Description

A girl with a crippling pea-phobia, a woman driven to murderous rage in an Anger Management Workshop, a wife torn between her dashing artist-lover and her uptight accountant-husband - these are some of the characters in Wendy Perriam's fifth short-story collection. Whatever the scenario, Perriam is alive to the raw emotion and underlying drama in even the most limited of lives, combining the daily dilemmas of personal relationships with a deeper exploration of psychological complexities.Many of the stories focus on some triumph or trauma of the human heart. Thirteen-year-old Kirsty is heartbroken on account of her father leaving home; Lynn eats her heart out over the mysterious Indonesians she has invited in off the street; stolid, suburban Ian undergoes a heart-transplant that not only saves his life, but changes his whole life and personality. And not forgetting Brian, the freckled, sandy-haired credit controller who, on his first-ever trip abroad, loses his heart to sultry Fiorella in Sorrento.Haunting and humorous by turns, this new collection depicts that a world of happiness and heartache lie perilously close.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #737917 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
"The best of the stories are models of the form, bringing humdrum lives into brilliant focus, as events take an unexpected twist." Sunday Telegraph "One of the most interesting unsung novelists of her generation. Intelligent and accessible... she writes beautifully about relationships and hilariously about sex." Sunday Telegraph "One of the finest and funniest writers to emerge in England since Kingsley Amis. She is gifted with devastating powers of observation and can call up characters who are both compact and complex." Herald Tribune "Each book is a magnificently orchestrated orgy in which her potent blend of sex, religion and humour takes the reader on a spiritual odyssey from the solid rocks of safety to the wilder shores of fantasy." Time Out "Perriam must be a contender for Britain's most underrated novelist." Daily Telegraph "Wendy Perriam was born to write. She looks at the world with a different eye from the rest of us. Her work refreshes and exhilarates. She gets to the heart of the matter, and there, lurking below the seriously mundane, we discover the spiritual underpinnings of the universe. I am her greatest fan." Fay Weldon "Perriam remains a writer of great charm and considerable technical skill, crafting well-observed tales in which entire emotional worlds can be glimpsed. The title story, blending humour and pathos, is typically adroit. It takes a seemingly absurd situation - a tutor coaching a group of strangers in the art of laughing - and extracts the kernel of human truth from the demented ho-ho-ho-ing." Sunday Telegraph "The 23 new stories in novelist Wendy Perriam's third collection are set firmly in the contemporary world. But the characters who move through the prosaic settings are surprising indeed... Yet Perriam's x-ray eyes pierce to their marrow, and her discoveries put the stories in an entirely new context, irradiated with the light of her profound humanity, her sharp comic sense and sometimes her anger. Never predictable, never sentimental, she is a terrific champion of the powers of the imagination to transform individual lives." The Tablet"

Sunday Times
'Perriam is a writer of authority and skill, with a wicked ear for conversational quirks.'

Times Literary Supplement
'She has a considerable command of her craft and a shrewd sense of those aspects of contemporary life which are worth recording.'