Constance Keating has lived a life of exile alienated from her family and from Ireland. Now she has returned home to die. While that process takes place she replays the fragments of her past. And, as …
"I am not mad, only old. . . . I am in a concentration camp for the old." So begins May Sarton's short, swift blow of a novel, about the powerlessness of the old and the rage it can bring. As We Are N…
Three sisters marry very different men and the choices they make determine whether they will flourish, be tamed or be repressed. Lucy's husband is her beloved companion; Vera's husband bores her and s…
Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected t…
High Wages (1930) was Dorothy Whipple's second novel. It is about a girl called Jane who gets a badly-paid job in a draper’s shop in the early years of the last century. Yet the title of the book is b…
La niña Nada abre los ojos en la cama de un sanatorio al que no sabe cómo ha llegado. Los recuerdos, las pesadillas y los ensueños provocados por los fármacos la trasladan a un tiempo anterior, cuando…
A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a cont…
It’s November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn’t particularly happy in his job but…
'A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love' commented the Spectator recently about this 1953 novel by Dorothy Whipple, which was ignored fifty years ago because 'edito…
