NOTHING TO WEAR AND NOWHERE TO HIDE: A Collection of Short Stories - Tapa blanda

‘Short stories that slam doors. Fay Weldon’s women make sudden, abrupt, life-transforming changes: they give up everything, they decamp to the country, they take up crime, they send men into or out of their lives. Weldon is a wonderfully inventive scene-setter, making extraordinary luminous little worlds and strange internal realities. She is funny, sharp-tongued, gossipy. These are pithy, quirky, explosive little tales of not quite everyday life where nobody transcends anything or comes out smelling of roses. Barmy at times, but never dull.’ Amanda Mitchison, Daily Telegraph

‘The offspring of Angela Carter, darts barbed and stabbed in the throat of revenge. Mostly you find yourself in a slipstream, unlike the women who shore-up these tales and weather tough squalls through life’s emotional, male-strewn path. Weldon is a devoted child of her time and a serial mother of invention. She merges a quintessential, zappy Sixties sharpness with the ability to update her feel for the pulse of whatever is hip or chic or symbolic of each dawning era. Weldon oozes readability, so unlike the Powers of Boredom that crawl from so many publishers’ lists. She should be cloned.’ Tom Adair, Scotsman

A spiky, feisty, hilarious collection of stories that expose women’s clumsy, often doomed, attempts to negotiate a smooth path through life.

Abandoned wives remain as lingering presences in the homes of their ex-husband’s new girlfriends; beautiful young models find their misdemeanours exposed for all the world to see in the tabloids; middle-aged women get swept off their feet and into the criminal underworld by charismatic con-men; young trophy wives get thrown in jail after over-exuberant cavorting on their private yachts; mothers beg their thirty something career-minded daughters to freeze their eggs in the hope that they may one day bear their grandchildren.

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. Both her legions of existing fans and new readers will be enthralled.