Best Selling Books by Beryl Bainbridge

The book that finally won Beryl Bainbridge a Booker prize: by popular vote the Best of Beryl.

A “dark and brilliant” story of the secrets, sex, and violence playing out behind the scenes of a repertory theater troupe in postwar Liverpool: “Never before has showbusiness been revealed as less romantic.” (Patrick Skene Catling, The Sunday Telegraph) Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the gray postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theater company rehearses for their Christmas performance of Peter Pan. Treading the boards for the first time is sixteen-year-old Stella Bradshaw, ambitious, idealistic, and still overwhelmingly innocent. She falls hard for the rakish, monocled director, Meredith Potter, but, unable to attract his attentions—and not understanding why he’s spending quite so much time with their male colleagues—she turns to another to initiate her in the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O’Hara, their dashing leading man who’s nursing secrets of his own. When the curtain is up, fantastical entertainment abounds, but backstage a very different drama is playing out: a pitch-black comedy of indiscretion, intrigue, and eventual tragedy. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and dusted with that magical “air of Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice [that] lingers around the margins of [all of Beryl Bainbridge’s] fiction,” (Michiko Katutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author’s very best—and best-loved—novels.

Three unforgettable novels from the “subversive and ever-mischievous imagination” of a celebrated British author and five-time Man Booker Prize nominee (The New York Times). With crisp prose and sardonic wit, Dame Beryl Bainbridge established a unique position for herself in the landscape of modern British literature. In the three novels collected here, Bainbridge explores disasters both epic and intimate, drawing inspiration from historical figures as well as her own life experiences to produce tightly woven tales that are at once ironic and honest, subtle and surprising. An Awfully Big Adventure: In postwar Liverpool, a teenage girl joins a local theater troupe and discovers the unflattering truths behind the gloss of adulthood. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this atmospheric novel was adapted into a film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. “A former actress herself, Ms. Bainbridge chronicles the backstage antics of her fictional theater company with knowing aplomb.” —The New York Times The Birthday Boys: In 1910, Capt. Robert Falcon Scott led a harrowing race to the South Pole. With this imaginative yet historically accurate retelling of their famous and ill-fated mission, “Bainbridge has quite surpassed herself” (Financial Times). “Equally convincing in its evocations of the icy, unendurable landscape without, and the chilling interior landscapes of damaged souls.” —The Sunday Telegraph Master Georgie: The story of a British surgeon journeying toward the horrors of the Crimean War is told from the perspective of three companions who each believe they knew him best. This “stunning” novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won numerous awards (The New Yorker). “Accomplished with stupendous technical skill . . . a true novelist’s novel.” —The Guardian

This historical novel set during the eighteenth century recounts the tumultuous final years of famed English lexicographer and poet Samuel Johnson. In 1764, Britain’s greatest man of letters—the writer of the first English dictionary—shut himself in his room and refused to come out. Exhausted from working on an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, Samuel Johnson had fallen into a deep depression. He refused to eat and only opened his door to cry out incomprehensible phrases or empty his chamber pot. Finally, a priest was able to lure the scholar out of confinement, and, as he did, Johnson’s friend Henry Thrales arrived. Shocked by Johnson’s fit of madness, Thrales promptly whisked the man away for recuperation at a country mansion south of London. Thus began one of the happiest periods of Johnson’s life. At the Thrales residence in Streatham, Johnson regained his sanity and engaged in family life. He selected books for the estate’s library, joked around at parties, and became close to Thrales’s wife, Hester. But as the years passed, the affection between Johnson and Hester developed into a dark romantic affair, the Thrales’s daughter grew up and became aware of her mother’s emotional unavailability, and Johnson’s passions and eccentricities led to cumbersome moral and spiritual dilemmas. With chapter titles taken from entries in Johnson’s legendary dictionary, lauded British author Beryl Bainbridge paints a well-rounded portrait of an extraordinary man and his all-too-human experiences. Written from the perspective of the Thrales’s daughter, According to Queeney heightens fact with fiction, sincerity with irony, and humor with despair. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, it is a captivating account of the Georgian era, lending modern insight to British history.

The complete short stories--including six previously uncollected works and one novella--of award-winning British literary giant Beryl Bainbridge. From one of the United Kingdom''s most famed female novelists come nineteen different takes on the often cruel, usually comic, and utterly strange realities of human life and imagination. From the collection Mum and Mr Armitage is the eponymous tale in which two pranksters at a holiday resort play "harmless" jokes on the people and livestock that surround them--until they must pay the price for taking the fun too far. In "The Longstop," unspoken familial information collides with a game of cricket, and in "People for Lunch," two lovers are ironically compelled to ruminate on the dilemmas of adultery. And among the previously uncollected work compiled here are "The Man from Wavertree" and "Poles Apart." The former is a quick look into the eccentric world of Rose and her tenant, Purdy, who is trying to sell his motorbike. The latter tells the story of a popular woman in her late seventies who tells a lie in an attempt to get out of a Christmas party invitation, only to find out her fib has come true. Collected Stories concludes with "Filthy Lucre," a Victorian melodrama that author Beryl Bainbridge wrote when she was only thirteen. In this precocious tale, a dying man asks a friend to take revenge on the family he thinks has cheated him out of his inheritance. What follows is a surprisingly mature and thoroughly sensational tale of murder, deception, love, and treasure islands. Called a "consummate storyteller" by the Sunday Times, Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times in her career, and is perhaps best known for her psychological novels The Bottle Factory Outing and Injury Time. However, her short fiction, hailed by the Times as "impressive," is equally masterful.

''Extremely lively'' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ''A work of art'' SCOTSMAN ''Genius'' SUNDAY TIMES An old snapshot shows a group of friends lounging in the sunshine, on a weekend in the country at the invitation of bearded, satyric Claude and his wife Julia. The girl in the centre is dreamy Lily, whose latest failed love affair forms the purpose of the weekend, as Lily''s friends set out to help her ensnare an unwitting father for her unborn child. Next to her is Norman, a Marxist romantic hell-bent on seducing his milk-white hostess; behind them is old, persecuted Shebah; and slightly apart, the young man on whom all hopes are pinned: quiet, pleasant Edward. Told through the fractured narratives of Claude, Lily, Shebah and Norman, in Beryl Bainbridge''s first published novel a darkly comic weekend of friendship and failure unravels.

The tragicomic tale of a dysfunctional middle-class family in postwar England from the award-winning author of Injury Time. Though the Second World War has ended, times are anything but peaceful for seventeen-year-old Alan. His father, an entrepreneur who was once able to provide the family with a comfortable life, is now struggling to put food on the table. Meanwhile, Alan’s mother dresses as if money is plentiful and spends all her time avoiding her husband, indulging in the escapism of romance novels, and engaging in real-world love affairs. And as if a household struck by poverty and marital trouble isn’t enough, Alan’s bohemian sister, Madge, has been sneaking off into the sand dunes for lusty rendezvous with a German POW. All Alan wants is for his sister to stop cavorting around and driving their father mad—and for a pretty choir girl named Janet to notice him. But the more he wishes for a normal life, the more chaotic it becomes. Everyone in his family is hiding something, not only from one another but also from themselves. And they’re all desperately clinging to something that is inevitably falling apart. Award-winning British author Beryl Bainbridge has a keen eye for the dark humor that lurks in misery and a knack for illuminating the emotional rubble of postwar England. A Quiet Life is an entertaining family drama that is at once a quick read and a lasting portrait of twentieth-century life.

''Harriet Said is a highly plotted horror tale that turns the "Obstinate Questionings" of puberty into deadly weapons'' NEW YORK TIMES ''An extremely original and disconcerting story'' DAILY TELEGRAPH ''A sharp, chilling novel . . . The ending has real shock effect'' SUNDAY TIMES A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches and encounters ''the Tsar'' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive. Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences. A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge''s classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.

''Cunningly clever, wry, dry, sharply pointed'' EVENING STANDARD ''Alarming humour and a powerful talent'' DAILY TELEGRAPH ''Bainbridge is brilliant at combining established fact and compelling fiction'' DAILY MAIL ''People came in and out, chairs were moved, dishes gathered up on trays, but it was happening at a great distance; she concentrated entirely on his pink face crowned with foppish curls.'' Genteel, passive Ann works for the BBC in London and is engaged to a successful academic, fulfilling her snobbish mother''s ambitions - more or less - while the Swinging Sixties happen elsewhere, to other people. Then she meets William: snub-nosed and generous, cunning and protean. She is first seduced, then transfixed, as William''s past, present and future swirl around her overwhelmingly and Ann is herself irrevocably and irreparably changed.

Follows the story of how General Washington came to the shop of Betsy Ross and asked her to sew a flag for the American colonists in revolt. For grades two through six.

A Victorian marriage shockingly unravels in domestic tragedy in this acclaimed novel by the unpredictable Beryl Bainbridge.

Winner of the Whitbread Literary Award: A darkly humorous tale about a 1970s dinner party gone terribly wrong by one of Britain’s most renowned authors. Edward is normally a cautious man, especially when it comes to his mistress, Binny. But he feels bad that his lover never gets to enjoy the small intimacies of marriage, like sorting his socks or picking out gifts for his family. It is out of this guilt that Edward agrees to throw a dinner party with his “real friends” so Binny can feel more involved in his life and play hostess for a night. But there’s one catch: Edward has to be home no later than eleven to keep his wife from discovering his infidelity. The invitees to the secret soiree are a discreet couple: Simpson, an aspiring adulterer himself, and Muriel, a simultaneously disapproving and open-minded housewife. But as Binny haphazardly prepares the food, shoos her children out for the night, and frets about the aesthetics of her front lawn, the guests take an unintended detour through her run-down neighborhood. Edward, meanwhile, is silently panicking—and drinking. Simpson and Muriel finally arrive, and when everyone sits down to eat, it’s already a quarter past nine. Things get off to a decent, if awkward, start, until there’s a loud knock at the door. It’s Binny’s scandalously drunk old friend, Alma, who proceeds to vomit and pass out. But what should be the end of the evening is only the beginning. More unexpected guests arrive—this time it’s bank robbers with sawed-off shotguns. What follows is a chaotic and hilarious series of events, replete with a fake ping-pong match, a baby carriage full of cash, and a delirious getaway. Edward soon begins to worry less about getting home on time, and more about making it home at all. Equal parts dark comedy and thriller, Injury Time is a witty take on 1970s social mores by one of the most celebrated British authors, Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Beryl Bainbridge including rare images from the author’s estate.

The Whitbread Novel of the Year, read by the winner of the Sony Radio Award.

This funny, yet horrifying novel creates an atmosphere of impending doom with an ending specialising in successive denouements.