A classic from beloved national treasure Fay Weldon sees four women break the shackles of patriarchy and domesticity in 1950s London, from the author of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil

With a foreword by Jenny Colgan

‘Down among the women. What a place to be!’

So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London.

Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.

Over the course of twenty years, from the Fifties to the Seventies, Scarlet, Wanda and their friends will wonder if they can ever become the women they always dreamed of being.

Praise for Fay Weldon:
‘A national treasure’ Literary Review
‘Wickedly stylish. Bursting with intelligence and fire’ Daily Telegraph
‘Prolific and provocative, Weldon shines brightest in the league table of British women novelists’ Time Out
‘A queen of words’ Caitlin Moran

From the 1930s to the 2000s, Fay Weldon has seen and lived our times. As a child in New Zealand, young and poor in London, unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, spag-bol-cook, winer-and-diner, there are few waterfronts that she hasn’t covered, few battles she hasn’t fought. An icon to many, a thorn-in-the-flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. Her life and times cover love, sex, babies, blokes, poverty, work, politics, and not a few Very Famous Names.

Moving from New Zealand to London to Scotland, from the UK to points east and west, Weldon has sipped, gulped, and sometimes spat out the things that make us what we are today.

‘A tour de force’
The Times

‘Intoxicating’
Daily Telegraph

‘Devilishly delightful’
New York Times Book Review

‘Beautifully and compellingly written’
Sunday Express

‘Audacious’
Times Literary Supplement

The bestselling classic tale of a woman scorned, from a much-loved British author

Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish.

Rather the opposite in fact – simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge.

A blackly comic satire of the war of the sexes, The Life and Loves of a She Devil is the fantasy of the wronged woman made real.

PRAISE FOR FAY WELDON

‘She’s a Queen of Words’
Caitlin Moran

‘A national treasure’
Literary Review

‘The literary equivalent of a stiff drink, a dip in the Atlantic in January, a pep talk by a mildly sadistic coach’
New York Times

‘Times have changed and Weldon is one of the people who have changed them’
The Times

‘One of the great lionesses of modern English literature’
Harper’s Bazaar

‘Fay Weldon’s voice is as unmistakeable as her acerbic wit’
Financial Times