Published by Vintage, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£6.99
Author:
Margaret Forster
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780099472131
£6.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780099472131
Published: 2 Feb 2006
What do Mrs H., Rachel, Edwina, Ida, Sarah, Dot, Chrissie have in common? They're all women, but they're fat, thin, old, young, married or single - and appear as diverse as human nature can be. But they are all survivors. This enthralling novel follows the ripples that go out into ordinary lives that have been changed by a shared experience, all connected by the same hospital clinic in a small Northern town.
This is a novel about what it means to live in the shadow of disease, and with scars, whether mental or physical. From the marvellous ambivalence of the title question, it leaves us with a whole lot more to consider about life and its infinite variety.
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Few authors share Margaret Forster's extraordinary ability to transform the ordinary day-to-day activities of unremarkable people into compelling fiction... Written with brilliant and exquisite sensitivity
- Daily Mail
Written with enormous sensitivity and compassion
- Red
The kind of novel into which you plunge with satisfaction
- Sunday Times
Accomplished...moving
- Times Literary Supplement
Written with insight, wit and tremendous style
- Spectator
Forster's empathy and lack of sentimentality, as well as her quick ear and eye for the telling detail, command attention, while her skills as a storyteller ensure the reader's avid curiosity about what happens next
- Literary Review
Forster excels at depicting ordinary lives.Beautifully controlled
- Independent on Sunday
Forster's prose, is, as always, clear, robust and unpretentious
- Daily Telegraph
Pristine writing
- Time Out
Insightful and intelligent
- Woman & Home
Wonderfully comic and touching
- Sunday Telegraph
The kind of novel into which you plunge with satisfaction
- Sunday Times
Interweaves a variety of thoroughly imagined life stories and predicaments with quiet, effective skill
- Mail on Sunday
I have greater admiration for Margaret Forster than for most novelists. A very fine, continuously interesting, and often moving work, all the better because it is so firmly rooted in the ordinary world of everyday experience
- Scotsman
Margaret Forster is the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want?, Over and Isa and May, as well as bestselling memoirs (Hidden Lives and Precious Lives) and biographies. She is married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lives in London and the Lake District.
