FAY WELDON

Meet Frances, one-time national treasure, former famous writer... and Fay Weldons might-have-been younger sister. Its 2013. Fay has long since emigrated (wouldnt you, if your imaginary sister stole your future?), and eighty-year-old Frances, her glory days gone, is savouring a slice of National Meat Loaf in her once-magnificent house. Communisms dead, capitalisms fallen, and now government bailiffs are banging on her door...How did it come to this? When did CiviCams and powdered egg replace gossipy dinners and chocolate mousse? As Frances tries to make sense of her story, fact and fiction begin to implode. What secrets are her family hiding? Is her skunk-smoking grandson plotting revolution upstairs? And just what makes National Meat Loaf so tasty?

Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua - a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within.Scarlet - a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order - has announced to Beverley - her aged grandmother - that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright - he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but shes not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble.And neither are the kehua outside the window.The sins and traumas of the past haunt us all. Call them hungry ghosts, grateful dead, dybbuks, kelpies, poltergeists, furies or kehua, we carry them with us - across continents, oceans, decades and generations. Quite how they became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writers tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them...

Esther Wells goes on a diet and the scales fall from her eyes. Depriving themselves of fatty foods, both husband and wife have new perspectives on each other, and the process is one of slow destruction of their marriage. Esther tells in flashback, from the depths of her basement apartment in Earls Court, the history of her marital disaster - in between her consumption of chocolate cake, tinned fruit, sweet sherry and a host of other high-calorie goodies. This novel examines the role of Womanhood. The time is the mid-sixties when sex role stereotypes are being examined and rejected, and Fay Weldon's book reflects the passions, humor, and anger of an era when women's self-analysis entailed a good deal of disruption. This novel depicts the rage and outrage of that traumatic era.

A novel of love, death and aristocracy in twenties London. Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is twenty-four, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - worse - intelligent. Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can bribe a man to marry her. What nobody knows is that Vivien is pregnant, and will die in childbirth in just a few months..

'The women of the world gave up romance, subservience and submission, and once empowered, took to hard work, truth and reality. Much good has it done them.' Ruth Patchett, the original She Devil, is now eighty-four and keen to retire. But who can take up her mantle? Enter Tyler Patchett, our new kind of heroine and Ruth's grandson. He's an ultra-confident, twenty-three-year-old man: beautiful, resentful and unemployed. Tyler won't be satisfied until he can transition into the ultimate symbol of power and status. A woman. In Fay Weldon's 1983 classic, The Life and Loves of a She Devil, women fought men for power and won. In 2017, men take a decisive step to get their power back...

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, from prostitute to rape victim, wife to adulteress and eventually becomes the accidental leader of an international womens movement.Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where shes attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey a peppered with more than a few detours along the way ...