Книги, похожие на «Gwendoline Butler, The Coffin Tree»

Whoever said life began at 40 was dead right…A riotous romantic comedy about never-ending motherhood, second chances and growing old disgracefully.What do you do when:Mr Could Do Worse dumps you on the very night you think he's going to propose?Your twenty-something son turns up on your doorstep, with a broken heart and dirty washing in tow?You find out you're going to be a granny – at 45?Your son's maybe ex-girlfriend's father starts making wickedly naughty suggestions?Your ex's new bit of stuff wants to become your new best friend?Your 70-year-old father is dating someone young enough to be your sister?You make the same mistakes you made in your twenties two whole decades later?You can't get the one person you want out of your head?You grab the vodka and wonder if you're too old for all this crap…

First published in 1984, under a pseudonym, as ‘The Diary of a Good Neighbour’ and ‘If the Old Could …’, and now published as ‘The Diaries of Jane Somers’, this is in many ways classic Lessing.The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort. But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other – Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman.‘The Diary of Jane Somers’ contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.