Before the War by Fay Weldon

Before the War by Fay Weldon

London, 1922. It's a cold November morning, the station is windswept and rural, the sky is threatening snow, and the train is late. Vivien Ripple, 20 years old and an ungainly five foot eleven, waits on the platform at Dilberne Halt. She is wealthy and well-bred--only daughter to the founder of Ripple & Co, the nation's top publisher--but plain, painfully awkward, and, perhaps worst of all, intelligent. Nicknamed the giantess, Vivvie is, in the estimation of most, already a spinster. But she has a plan. That very morning, Vivvie will ride to the city with the express purpose of changing her life forever.

Enter Sherwyn Sexton: charismatic, handsome--if, to his dismay, rather short. He's an aspiring novelist and editor at Ripple & Co whose greatest love is the (similarly handsome, but taller) protagonist of his thriller series. He also has a penchant for pretty young women--single and otherwise. Sherwyn is shocked when his boss's hulking daughter, dressed in a tweed jacket and moth-eaten scarf, strides into his office and asks for his hand in marriage. But his finances are running thin to support his regular dinners on the town, and Vivien's promise to house him in comfort while he writes is simply too good to refuse. What neither of them know is that she is pregnant by another man, and will die in childbirth in just a few months.

With one eye on the present and one on the past, Fay Weldon offers Vivien's fate, along with that of London between World Wars I and I: a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers, and aristocrats clinging to history.

Inventive, warm, playful, and full of Weldon's trademark ironic edge, Before the War is a spellbinding novel from one of the greatest writers of our time.

Fay Weldon was raised in a household of women in New Zealand and produced four sons of her own, as if to balance the gender count. After earning degrees in economics and psychology at the University of Edinburgh, she survived a decade of odd jobs and hard times, then began writing film and television scripts and fiction. Among her 18 novels and short-story collections are Trouble, Life Force, The Cloning of Joanna May, Darcy's Utopia, The Shrapnel Academy, The Life and Loves of a She-devil, Leader of the Band, Puffball, and The Heart of the Country, winner of the 1989 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Fay Weldon lives in London and Somerset, England.

SKU	CIN125012123XA
ISBN 13	9781250121233
ISBN 10	125012123X
Title	Before the War
Author	Fay Weldon
Condition	Well read
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	St. Martin's Press
Year published	2017-03-14
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	This is a used book. We do our best to provide good quality books for you to read, but there is no escaping the fact that it has been owned and read by someone else previously. Therefore it will show signs of wear and may be an ex library book