Книги, похожие на «Rosie Thomas, A Simple Life»

An outstanding début novel – an original and engaging black comedy about an angst-ridden twenty-something Londoner whose main achievement in life seems to be that he can prove that he’s a loser.‘If I had a business card there’s only one thing it could say on it: Frank Stretch – less successful than my friends’Now, you may think you’re less successful than your friends, and you may well be right. The difference between you and Frank, however, is that he has a system that proves it. Everyone he knows or meets is given a ‘life score’ – marks out of ten for the ten ‘important’ areas of life: money, love, sex, work, car etc.His best friend Tom scores an impressive 73, his flatmate Henry 59. Even his oily and more-than-likely criminal boss Bart scores a hefty 68. But Frank – with his going-nowhere job managing one of Bart’s yuppie bars, his rusting 1977 Cavalier and the fact that he hasn’t pulled for months – weighs in with a paltry 29.Frank finally decides that things must change. But with Frank’s luck, there’s every chance that things will get a lot worse before they get better…

A classic tale from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, of a family torn apart by the arrival of Ben, their feral fifth child.‘Listening to the laughter, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David would reach for each other’s hand, and smile, and breathe happiness.’Four children, a beautiful old house, the love of relatives and friends – Harriet and David Lovatt’s life is a glorious hymn to domestic bliss and old-fashioned family values. But when their fifth child is born, a sickly and implacable shadow is cast over this tender idyll. Large and ugly, violent and uncontrollable, the infant Ben, ‘full of cold dislike’, tears at Harriet’s breast. Struggling to care for her new-born child, faced with a darkness and a strange defiance she has never known before, Harriet is deeply afraid of what, exactly, she has brought into the world …