Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide

Fay Weldon is a novelist, screenwriter and cultural journalist. Her novels include ‘The Life and Loves of a She-Devil’, ‘Puffball’, ‘Big Women’ and ‘Rhode Island Blues’. She has also published her autobiography ‘Auto da Fay’. Her most recent novel was the critically acclaimed ‘She May Not Leave’. She lives in Dorset.

‘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