検索キーワード： 著者 "Fay Weldon" すべてのカテゴリー

Beverley may be close to ninety, but when her granddaughter announces her plans to leave home and husband for a glamorous actor, she’s already considering how she can stir up a little trouble. And so are the kehua outside. Quite how these Maori ghosts arrived outside the kitchen window is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that everyone is haunted by the traumas of the past, that Beverley’s female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden - and that murder is at the root of it all....

England, 1903. Lord Robert and Lady Isobel Dilberne and the entire grand estate, with its hundred rooms, is busy planning for a visit from Edward VII and Queen Alexandra just a few months a way. Preparations are elaborate and exhaustive: the menus and fashions must be just so, and so must James, the new heir and son of Arthur Dilberne and Chicago heiress, Minnie O'Brien. But there are problems. Little James is being reared to Lady Isobel's tastes, not Minnie's. And Mrs. O'Brien is visiting from America and causing trouble.

As the Season of 1899 comes to an end, the world is poised on the brink of profound, irrevocable change. The Earl of Dilberne is facing serious financial concerns. The ripple effects spread to everyone in the household: Lord Robert, who has gambled unwisely on the stock market and seeks a place in the Cabinet; his unmarried children, Arthur, who keeps a courtesan, and Rosina, who keeps a parrot in her bedroom; Lord Robert's wife Isobel, who orders the affairs of the household in Belgrave Square; and Grace, the lady's maid who orders the life of her mistress.

It’s 2013, and 80-year-old Frances (has-been writer) is sitting on the stairs of No.3 Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, listening to the debt collectors pounding on her front door. From this house she’s witnessed five decades of world history. While she waits for the bailiffs to give up and leave, Frances writes. She writes about the boyfriends she borrowed and the husband she stole from Fay, about her daughters and their children. The problem is that fact and fiction are blurring in Frances’s mind.

Ten high achieving ladies are gathered together in the week between Christmas and the New Year, at the expensive Castle Spa, seeking, through Botox, aromatherapy and general all round pampering, a new beginning to their lives.

Alexandra Ludd is an actress playing Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In the eyes of the world she has everything a woman could want: husband, home, child, income, good looks, good friends, the plaudits of the crowd and the affection of neighbours. But Alexandra inspires envy as well as love: she was unwise to forget it, she was complacent, perhaps a little vain - and all fate has to do to bring her down is to snip a single strand.... 

Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations. Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey - peppered with more than a few detours along the way.

How to be a reader - how to be a writer. All you need to know. Alice is an 18-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen's to her own niece, 'aunt' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only is her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself. 

How many women can you fit into one body? A novel of split personalities. A marriage, its breakdown, and a perforated heroine: one woman, many faces, many personalities, and more emerging: a crumbling house, and the rooms of that house (which in our dreams are aspects of the self). Any more traumas and it’s all over! Sir Edwin Rice has decided to divorce Lady Angelica, ex-rock star. She has behaved intolerably. He petitions the Court to set him free. Angelica fights back.

Annette and Spicer make a perfect pair. But on this, the first day of the rest of their blissful lives, Spicer fails to kiss Annette goodbye, as he leaves for the office. The years of marriage shift and change: the rock of Annette's marriage may be sand.

A novel about split personality, about the components of the self and genetic engineering. It tells the fate of Joanna May, who at the age of 60 discovers that she has been cloned and there are in fact four other versions of herself in existence.

Fay Weldon reads from her introduction to Corinthians. A figurehead of the early Christian church, Paul sets out some of his thoughts on strife and division, spirituality, the bond of marriage and hopes for his own immortality in this book. Her introduction is preceded by a reading from the book by Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh.

As 1901 comes to an end, there is much to be grateful for: The Dilberne fortune has been restored, and the grand Dilberne Court, with its 100 rooms, has been saved. Lord Robert's son, Arthur, is happily married to Chicago heiress, Minnie, who is pregnant and trying to come to terms with her new role as lady of the manor, and her charming but controlling mother-in-law, Lady Isobel. As Lord Robert and Lady Isobel get caught up in the preparations for the coronation of Edward VII, they debate the future of their recently orphaned niece, Adela.

"It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring... except a clot of blood, creeping up from Ted's leg to his brain, to kill him as he slept..." Recently widowed Philly keeps dreaming of her dead husband Ted – strange dreams of a paranormal alternate reality: why is her new husband Robbie so interested in them? He works for a mysterious genetic research company called Portal Inc. But what exactly is Robbie's job? Did he seduce Philly by feeding her experimental new drugs? Was Ted's death intended? Such suspicions make Philly doubt her own sanity.