Items related to The Habit of Widowhood
A young girl is brought up in seclusion by her elderly parents who are obsessed with isolating her from the sinfulness of life in the wicked world. When, to secure her future, they marry her off to an elderly widower, they set in motion events more terrible than the most hateful of parents could have foreseen. A woman with an enticing sexual secret marries an elderly gentleman - and then another and another. It is all too easy, it seems, to get into the habit of widowhood. A young soldier, home from World War I, is determined to live and love not just for himself, but for all his fallen comrades. But in doing so he enrages a number of husbands. A man going through a midlife crisis meets the bully who made his life hell at school. Some things never change, he discovers, including the taste for inflicting pain.
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From the Back Cover:
About the Author:
A new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed Robert Barnard that will both fascinate and chill.
A young couple arrive on their Greek honeymoon island paradise to find the snake already on the quay. A girl, kept innocent of the ways of the world by her religious family, has her future secured by marriage to an elderly widower. A soldier, home from the Somme makes dangerously free of the bedrooms of working-class Armley. A butcher does his sums and realises that his business won't stand the cost of a divorce settlement, and that he'll have to go for something more final.
Sometimes in Robert Barnard's short stories the setting is everyday, and that it is the family next door who find murder invading their prosaic existences. At other times more august figures are involved. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, initiates the fashion for royal confessionals by penning an account of a gambling scandal at his august Mama's Balmoral. And Jane Eyre finds that marriage to Mr Rochester is enough to drive any woman mad.
'The Habit of Widowhood' is Robert Barnard's first story collection for seven years, and the excellence and intricacy of his prose and plotting shows why the 'New York Times' suggested he 'could teach a spider a trick or two about spinning webs'.
PRAISE FOR ROBERT BARNARD:
'The Bad Samaritan'
"Robert Barnard's talent is fascinatingly on show in 'The Bad Samaritan."'
John Coleman, 'Sunday Times'
"Barnard is a dab hand with his peppermint and prayer-book bitchery".
Philip Oakes, 'Literary Review'
'The Masters of the House'
"Barnard never disappoints. The psychological suspense is chilling".
Marcel Berlins, 'The Times'
"Robert Barnard retails this finely suspenseful tale, incorporating the Hitchcockian awkwardness of disposing of a body, with spellbinding, step-by-step matter of factness'.
John Coleman, 'Sunday Times'
"Barnard at the very top of his form in an inner-city version of Babes in the Wood".
Gerald Kaufman, 'Scotsman'
Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was awarded the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he was a member of Britain's distinguished Detection Club, and, in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. His most recent novel, Charitable Body, was published by Scribner in 2012.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherISIS Paperbacks
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 075316227X
- ISBN 13 9780753162279
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages256
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