Books by Fay Weldon

Suburban complacency and marital infidelity get their comeuppance in this black comedy.

Helen Lally is 22, the stunning daughter of an impoverished artist whose fame and fortune will soon be made. Woe to her for catching the eye of Clifford Wexford, a 35-year-old art dealer, rapaciously ambitious, eminently eligible and careless of all lives but his own. In the spac...e of nine months in the ever-so-swinging '60s, Helen and Clifford meet, fall instantly in love, marry and produce the enchanting Nell. But there the want changes hands, as it will, time and again, in the course of this seductively high-spirited move. 'Someone, somewhere, must be wicked,' says the narrator, 'or the world wouldn't be in the state it's in.' Clifford falls prey to a scheming heiress; the perfect marriage ends in divorce; and little Nell, due to her parents' fecklessness and avarice, is lost. Lost to them, that is, until years later, when they have learned enough to deserve her. Written in a writer's prime, in a state of grace, The Hearts and Lives of Men is a modern fable for grown-ups. Good triumphs over evil; true love outlasts lust and greed; and if some people are beyond redemption, the justice they are dealt is perfectly crated and deeply satisfying.
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Alice is an 18-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen's to her own niece, 'aunt' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only i...s her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself.
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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.
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A collection of stories that expose women's clumsy, often doomed, attempts to negotiate a smooth path through life. Bold, glamorous, sexy, unrepentant, Fay Weldon's heroines offer a quite unique view of the world as they face their trials without fear or trepidation.