Mrs. Fytton's Country Life - Hardcover

Cheek, Mavis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312283342 ISBN 13: 9780312283346

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 2001

Synopsis

The best-selling British novel takes a humorous swipe at marriage, social conventions, and the male animal as it follows the trials and tribulations of wonderwife and supermother Angela Fytton, who has been unceremoniously dumped by a husband for a younger woman. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

Angela Fytton (née Lister) is the perfect wife and mother. Involved and interested in her husband Ian's business, capable mother, utterly together housewife and--even after two children--demon, cellulite-free lover. So it's rather a shock to her system when she's dumped for the younger, determinedly helpless dentist Belinda (Binnie), who Ian meets when she trips over her stilettos in front of him at a conference.

But Angela is a very resourceful woman and she's determined to get Ian back. Abandoning her two standard-issue selfish teenagers Claire and Andrew to their father and "fluffy" new stepmother (or more accurately, vice versa), she quits West London for the pure, spiritual country delights of Somerset; as she explains to Ian, Claire and Andrew over dinner, "You know, ancient forces drawing me back to my roots and all that ..."."

Here, she believes, the people are unspoiled, honest and steeped in tradition. Or so she thinks. What is it that Wanda and Dave-the-Bread next door have got to hide? What's elderly Dr. Tichborne up to with his binoculars? Why doesn't Sammy the pigman bother to wear his false teeth? And is the new young vicar really screened by the shrubs when he exercises starkers in the vicarage garden?

From Mavis Cheek, prize-winning author of Pause Between Acts, Janice Gets Sexy and Three Men on a Plane, a laugh-out-loud tale of self-discovery, women's history (check out the epigraphs at the start of each chapter), the comforts of tradition and joys of progress--and the benefits of getting it wrong. Just occasionally.Lisa Gee

From the Author

What were my reasons ?
What were my reasons for rewriting the classic tale of Woman's Revenge?

Oddly enough I didn't think that I had. I wanted to write about a married woman who felt she had put nearly everything into her marriage and was feistily devastated by the terrible shock of losing her husband to another (younger) woman. Angela Fytton wanted her husband back. It was less a revenge and more a strategy to achieve that end. She was wise in a rather baleful way. She knew that new love can be fragile under fire. A lot of women who have been dumped at a certain age say they don't really want revenge (though that, as incidental, must be sweet) they want their man and their marriage back. But all gains are losses (and vice versa)--in order to get her husband back she mus break up another family--a little moral conundrum for her to work out. And all losses are gains--to lose her husband is to gain a freedom (even if she thinks she doesn't want it) and in among the farce and the frolics of what takes place in the country when she moves there is a journey towards wisdom for her too.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312283342
• ISBN 13: 9780312283346
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332