The Sex Life of My Aunt - Softcover

Cheek, Mavis

3.39

448 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571205089 ISBN 13: 9780571205080

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2002

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Lovely home, lovely husband, lovely family. Apart from the envy of her less contented sister everything in Dilys' rags-to-riches life is lovely, lovely, lovely. Until the day she meets a man at a railway station who is also - lovely. As she hurtles towards either her destruction or her liberation she discovers that deceit is in the blueprint of our birth, that ancient Aunts have their own dark secrets, that envious sisters have their reasons. And that when Brief Encounters meet Basic instincts, the right choice, like truth, is rarely pure and never simple.

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Product Description:

paperback

Review:

After a traumatic and poverty-stricken childhood, Dilys, the heroine of Mavis Cheek's novel The Sex Life of My Aunt, has led an ideal existence for the past 30 years. Her devoted and successful husband Francis has paid the bills, kept her in fine clothes, indulged her fantasies about writing a book. She's wanted for nothing. Until one day, after a funeral, she finds herself in tears on a railway station, and a handsome young stranger offers her a handkerchief. The innocence of this brief encounter swiftly turns into a hideous campaign of deceit, as Dilys is sucked into an intense love affair, and experiences heights of passion she'd always believed beyond her reach. But the lies she must tell to sustain it lead Dilys to make some shocking discoveries about her own past.

The incorrigible Aunt Eliza of the book's title might be described as a "national treasure". So indeed, might the novel itself. Its cast--composed of well-meaning husbands, earnest radicals in bedsits, redoubtable old ladies in Lichfield--is vivid, irresistible, yet utterly familiar. Its backdrop of local trattorias, mini-breaks and Dorset holiday cottages is as comforting as a much-loved cardigan. But this is how--like Barbara Pym before her--Mavis Cheek establishes herself as a genius of the modern morality tale. In depicting the ordinary with such vigour, she prepares us to confront the extraordinary, the sometimes brutal truths that lurk behind the most homely fa�ade. To do so--and be hilariously funny at the same time--is a rare gift. --Matthew Baylis

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