The Life and Loves of a She Devil
On sale
15th October 2009
Price: £9.99
‘ONE OF OUR VERY BEST WRITERS’ Sunday Times
‘A tour de force’
The Times
‘Intoxicating’
Daily Telegraph
‘Devilishly delightful’
New York Times Book Review
‘Beautifully and compellingly written’
Sunday Express
‘Audacious’
Times Literary Supplement
THE BESTSELLING CLASSIC TALE OF A WOMAN SCORNED, FROM A MUCH-LOVED BRITISH AUTHOR
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.
PRAISE FOR FAY WELDON
‘She’s a Queen of Words’
Caitlin Moran
‘A national treasure’
Literary Review
‘The literary equivalent of a stiff drink, a dip in the Atlantic in January, a pep talk by a mildly sadistic coach’
New York Times
‘Times have changed and Weldon is one of the people who have changed them’
The Times
‘One of the great lionesses of modern English literature’
Harper’s Bazaar
‘Fay Weldon’s voice is as unmistakeable as her acerbic wit’
Financial Times
‘A tour de force’
The Times
‘Intoxicating’
Daily Telegraph
‘Devilishly delightful’
New York Times Book Review
‘Beautifully and compellingly written’
Sunday Express
‘Audacious’
Times Literary Supplement
THE BESTSELLING CLASSIC TALE OF A WOMAN SCORNED, FROM A MUCH-LOVED BRITISH AUTHOR
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.
PRAISE FOR FAY WELDON
‘She’s a Queen of Words’
Caitlin Moran
‘A national treasure’
Literary Review
‘The literary equivalent of a stiff drink, a dip in the Atlantic in January, a pep talk by a mildly sadistic coach’
New York Times
‘Times have changed and Weldon is one of the people who have changed them’
The Times
‘One of the great lionesses of modern English literature’
Harper’s Bazaar
‘Fay Weldon’s voice is as unmistakeable as her acerbic wit’
Financial Times
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Reviews
A tour de force: a macabre, fast-moving moral fable
More audacious and striking in design than anything that has gone before . . . carried out with such dash and glitter
Rousing . . . stimulating . . . the fun grows steadily blacker and wilder
A savage, sadistic even, but beautifully and compellingly written satire
A novel of blazingly hot revenge, one that amply illustrates the saying about heaven having no rage like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned
Devilishly delightful . . . It affords a scintillating, mindboggling, vicarious thrill for any reader who has ever fantasised dishing out retribution for one wrong or another
What makes this a powerfully funny and oddly powerful book is the energy of the language and of the intellect that conceived it, an energy that vibrates off the pages and that makes She Devil as exceptional a book in the remembering as in the reading . . . . a small, mad masterpiece
Fantastic . . . a carefully worked-out fable, satiric and finally bitter . . . it's very funny
Intoxicating