ANGUS WILSON

Meg Eliot is the wife of a successful barrister and with that comes a lovely home in Westminster, cocktail parties and a round of charity committees. She is the model wife and her life is one of ease, contentment and privilege.All that changes though when she is suddenly left widowed after a senseless tragedy. Totally alone she is thrust into a struggle to reconstruct her life as she realises that she doesnt really know who she is anymore or who she is supposed to be. The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot follows Meg as she tries to make sense of the realities of life, of living and contemplates the future and its possibilites. What she finds is the ability to survive and, also, the joys of new friendships, new opportunities and perhaps even the idea of a new love. Described by the Daily Telegraph as one of fictions great female creatures, Meg Eliot is a powerful heroine who inspired readers when she first appeared in 1958.

On its appearance in 1952 the Times Literary Supplement called Hemlock and Aftera novel of remarkable power and literary skill which deserves to be judged by the highest standards. Angus Wilsons first novel is concerned with the hypocrisies of middle-class society. The protagonist, Bernard Sands, is a novelist and an intellectual who tries to found a centre for young writers. However, Sands is a secret homosexual and in the post-war Britain of the time his liberal ideas cause much anxiety to those in charge. Surrounded by false friends and scheming enemies Sands has to come to terms with his emotions and is forced to decide where his loyalties lie.A compassionately written novel Hemlock and After explores the conflict of duty and love in one mans life and the consequences of our choices. Written at a time when homosexuality was still an offence Hemlock and After is a brilliantly handled novel from a writer who was described by John Betjeman as mercilessly accurate and never dull.

A compassionate portrait of an elderly - and frustrated - woman adjusting to new town life and finding a new purpose in living.Illness forces Sylvia Calvert to live with her son Harold, a headmaster in Carshall New Town. At first, Sylvia cannot adjust to the jungle of supermarkets, 10-pin bowling alleys and recreation areas; to the committees and purposeful entertaining involved in the creation of a new society.Above all, Sylvia cant understand Harolds odd, thrusting idealism and the strange behaviour of her grandchildren.But a chance meeting and a family crisis give her the chance to fulfil herself ...

A panoramic novel that stretches from 1912 to 1967 No Laughing Matter is perhaps Angus Wilsons most autobiographical novel. The novel chronicles the end of the bourgeois way of life as seen through the lives of the six Matthews children and their dysfuntional middle-class family. Their parents - Billy Pop and the Countess - are objects of ridicule to their children who vow never to make their mistakes. Quentin, the eldest, is a socialist who adores women. His fervent views, however, become distilled over the years until he transforms into a cynical TV pundit. Gladys, plump and amenable, is unlucky in love and eventually falls for the charms of a crook. Rupert, the handsome actor, has a successful career until he fails to adapt to the changing theatre. Margaret is a brilliant and highly acclaimed novelist but she becomes bitter as her twin Sukey sinks into domestic bliss, while Marcus, the baby of the family, believes that his career is his life. An ambitious and enriching novel No Laughing Matter is an extraordinary work in its depictions of complex family relationships, where it is just as easy to hate as to love and where everyone struggles to be an individual.

Angus Wilson is one of the most enjoyable novelists of the 20th century... Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) analyses a wide range of British society in a complicated plot that offers all the pleasures of detective fiction combined with a steady and humane insight. Margaret DrabbleFirst published in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes draws upon perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history: the Piltdown Man, finally exposed in 1953. The novels protagonist is Gerald Middleton, professor of early medieval history and taciturn creature of habit. Separated from his Swedish wife, Gerald is increasingly conscious of his failings. Moreover, some years ago he was involved in an excavation that led to the discovery of a grotesque idol in the tomb of Bishop Eorpwald. The sole survivor of the original excavation party, Gerald harbours a potentially ruinous secret...

Angus Wilsons first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set was first published in 1949 to immense critical acclaim. The collection is a brilliantly funny exposure of the protective devices with which people seek to mask deep-laid egotism. There is the wallowing in self-adulation on the part of the crazy Cockshott family, as they delight to dub themselves. There is the search for really nice standards on the part of Vi, singer at the Passion Fruit nightclub - as hopelessly bemused a spirit as ever lived in sin at Earls Court and attempted to lecture a young Communist nephew with untidy hair and spectacles. There is the humbug of the bullying new curator at the provincial Art Gallery. And the staff dance at the South Kensington hotel, where lives the lady who spends her life trying to achieve a Knightsbridge appearance on a Kensington purse, and where, as the evening progresses and the drinks begin to tell, the lady-like façades and gentlemanly courtesy of the clientele crack up with a vengeance.

Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970-73), this is Angus Wilsons most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals. Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice of his gifts as a naturalist. But power is more than just the complicated game played by the old men at the zoo in the satirical first half of this novel: it lies very near to violence, and in the second half real life inexorably turns to fantasy - the fantasy of war.This tense and at times brutal story offers the healing relationship between man and the natural world as a solution for the power dilemma.

Written in the 1950s, the eight stories collected here are brilliantly of their time: the decade of rubber plants, espresso bars and skiffle, of Suez, Teddy Boys and Angry Young Men.With compassion and deadly accuracy, Angus Wilson charts the scandals and secrets of the respectable middle classes - Kennie, the Borstal Boy mascot of an intellectual clique; June Raven, an SW3 hostess who gets over-involved with one of her publisher-husbands authors; Lord Peacehaven, retired megalomaniac; Maurice Liebig, teenage pawn in a family feud; and the mad old man who finds the justice of God in a hen roost.

Towards the end of Angus Wilsons life his short stories were entombed in a collected volume. By way of signifying the corpus was sadly complete that made sense but it didnt do justice to the importance and quality of his work in this medium.Three volumes of short stories were published - The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos and A Bit Off the Map. Faber Finds are reissuing these original selections.Angus Wilson made his initial reputation by his short stories, The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos being his first two published books, appearing in 1949 and 1950 respectively. When reviewing Such Darling Dodos C. P. Snow perceptively wrote, Part-bizarre, part-savage and part-maudlin, there is nothing much like it on the contemporary scene. It is rather as though a man of acute sensibility felt left out of the human party, and was surveying it, half-enviously, half-contemptuously, from the corner of the room, determined to strip-off the comfortable pretences and show that this party is pretty horrifying after all ... Sometimes the effect is too mad to be pleasant, sometimes most moving; no one could deny Mr Wilsons gift.As Margaret Drabble points out in her biography of Angus Wilson (to be reissued in Faber Finds) his stories were in their own way to be as iconoclastic and irreverent as John Osbornes plays were to be. They not so much deserve as demand to be re-read.