The re-dipping of dishes was a small matter, but the emotional texture of married life is made up of small matters. This one had become invested with a fatal quality. Imogen, the beautiful and much younger wife of distinguished barrister Evelyn Gresham, is facing the greatest challenge of her married… Read More

I can't help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can't stop them. It feels like preaching the gospel. When publishing assistant and war widow Nancy Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he 'urinates frightful prose', the repercussions are swift. Losing not one, but two, much-sought-after literary jobs, Mrs Hawkins… Read More

I dreamed with my eyes open. All the Corregidora women with narrow waists and high cheekbones and wide hips. All the Corregidora woman dancing. Blues singer Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora, the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her mother and grandmother. Charged with 'making generations' to… Read More

Giving a party was not as simple as going to one. You could always leave someone else's party. You were stuck with your own. Dolls - red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight. For Anne, Neely and Jennifer, it doesn't matter, as long as… Read More

It was jealousy that kept David from sleeping, drove him from a tousled bed out of the dark and silent boarding house to walk the streets... David Kelsey has an unswerving conviction that life is going to work out for him - if he can just fix the 'Situation'. His… Read More

We kept our heads above the morass, stifled screaming despairs only by the exercise of Good Behaviour. Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic St Charles family is sinking into a state of decaying grace. Aroon, the unlovely daughter of the house, silently longs for affection - which she… Read More

Contrary to what many of you might imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks - chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to actually sit down and write. Acerbic, wisecracking and hilarious, this is the definitive essay collection from the New York… Read More

From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in . . . New York City, 1940s. In a crumbling tenement in Harlem, Lutie Johnson is determined to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old boy,… Read More

Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put… Read More

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. When, at sixteen, Janie is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two… Read More