In the Driver's Seat

✍ Scribed by Simpson, Helen

• Book ID: 109256480
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 190 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

A dark, dazzling, surprisingly funny new collection of stories ("Masterly" --Adam Mars Jones, The Observer ; "A virtuoso performance" --Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) about single women and wives in various phases of midlife--anxious mothers, besotted mothers, beset mothers--in a (futile) search for security and consolation.

Helen Simpson's stories are short but by no means small. One story takes the Iraq war as its subject; another describes a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer; in another, a simple tale of home maintenance--a woman in a conversation with the carpenter replacing her door after a break-in--becomes a deftly sketched study of grief. In still another, Simpson manages the seemingly impossible--producing laughter at terminal illness and untimely death (this might be the first story in which the amputation of a limb provides a happy ending). And finally, the story entitled "Constitutional"--a pun on one of the word's meanings: a...