The Pumpkin Eater - Hardcover

Mortimer, Penelope

3.66

2,511 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747518874 ISBN 13: 9780747518877

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1995

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The unnamed narrator of this story is married to her fourth and excessively well-paid husband. This income only serves to highlight the emptiness of a life led by a woman deprived of the domestic trappings that have defined her.

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Review:

Beautiful ... almost every woman I can think of will want to read this book (Edna O'Brien)

A strange, fresh, gripping book. One of the the many achievements of The Pumpkin Eater is that it somehow manages to find universal truths in what was hardly an archetypal situation: Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy, so that what we're asked to look at is frequently red-raw and painful without being remotely self-dramatizing. In fact, there's a dreaminess to some of the prose that is particularly impressive, considering the tumult that the book describes (Nick Hornby)

Mortimer's style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel ... Will Penguin's new edition of The Pumpkin Eater encourage people to look again at Mortimer? I hope so. She is so good. I can't think of a writer more attentive to emotional weather (Rachel Cooke The Observer)

One of those novels which seem to be written with real knowledge of the brink of the abyss, taut almost beyond endurance (The Sunday Times)

A seriously good writer (Telegraph)

A subtle, fascinating, unhackneyed novel... in touch with human realities and frailties, unsentimental and amused... So moving, so funny, so desperate, so alive... [A] fine book, and one to be greatly enjoyed (The New York Times)

In this, her best book, Mortimer employs a steely, sceptical firm-eyed prose, which pays readers the compliment of regarding them almost as collaborators (Guardian)

The themes in this short novel are timeless. There are lessons here for us all (The Times)

About the Author:

Penelope Mortimer was born in 1918 in Rhyl. At nineteen, she married a Reuters correspondent and had two daughters with him, as well as two more from other relationships. Her first novel, Johanna, was published in 1947. She re-married two years later, to John Mortimer, the barrister and author of the Rumpole novels; they had two children together and later divorced. Mortimer wrote many books, including The Pumpkin Eater (1962), which was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and made into a film starring Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch. Penelope Mortimer died in 1999.

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