Queen Camilla - Softcover

Townsend, Sue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141032634 ISBN 13: 9780141032634

Publisher: Penguin, 2007

Synopsis

England was an unhappy and fearful land. In a desperate attempt to prevail over crime and social disorder Jack Barker, the Prime Minister has created Exclusion Zones for all of society’s misfits, including the criminal, the inadequate, the feckless, the stupid, the morbidly obese and – the Royal Family.

Prince Charles and the love of his life, Camilla live in Hell Close. He enjoys poultry keeping, composing letters to his dear friend Nicholas ‘Fatty’ Soames and tending his vegetable patch. Camilla spends her days doing as little as possible aside from having her roots retouched by her neighbour, the trouble-maker, Beverley Threadgold and trying to keep Charles from sinking into melancholic self-pity.

When the Queen announces that she is about to abdicate, Charles refuses to follow his destiny unless his wife can be Queen – and public opinion suggests the people would rather have silicone breasted Jordan than Camilla on the throne. But no sooner has Prince William offered himself as the next monarch than one Graham Cracknall, the Tidily wink champion of Ruislip emerges – claiming to be Charles and Camilla’s forty-one year old secret love child, and therefore the rightful heir to the crown.

In the run up to the General Election, Jack Barker instigates a one dog per household policy as part of his war on dogs.How will Camilla and Charles choose between her beloved Jack Russels, Freddy and Tosca, and his mongrel Leo. The dogs on the Fez Estate have to act collectively if they are going to save themselves and the entire dog population of England.

Will sanity prevail over the right royal cock-up that England has become? Or will chaos reign supreme?

About this title

Review:

[Townsend's] political fantasies achieve satire's difficult double aim of being credibly realistic and preposterously funny (Sunday Times)

A brilliantly satirical story - just the kind of book, one imagines, Camilla would keep in her loo (Evening Standard)

One of our finest living comic writers (The Times)

Brilliantly funny (Closer)

Another fantastic read from Townsend (OK!)

About the Author:

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946. Despite not learning to read until the age of eight, leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications and having three children by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she always found time to read widely. She also wrote secretly for twenty years. After joining a writers' group at The Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, she won a Thames Television award for her first play, Womberang, and became a professional playwright and novelist. After the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, Sue continued to make the nation laugh and prick its conscience. She wrote seven further volumes of Adrian's diaries and five other popular novels - including The Queen and I, Number Ten and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year - and numerous well received plays. Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She remains widely regarded as Britain's favourite comic writer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0141032634
• ISBN 13: 9780141032634
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464