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Stories
by Alan Bennett
One of England's finest and most loved writers explores the uncomfortable and tragicomic gap between people's public appearance and their private desires in two tender and surprising stories.
In "The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson," a recently bereaved widow finds interesting ways to supplement her income by performing as a patient for medical students, and renting out her spare room. Quiet, middle-class, and middle-aged, Mrs. Donaldson will soon discover that she rather enjoys role-play at the hospital, and the irregular and startling entertainment provided by her tenants.
In "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," a disappointed middle-aged mother dotes on her only son, Graham, who believes he must shield her from the truth. As Graham's double life becomes increasingly complicated, we realize how little he understands, not only of his own desires but also those of his mother.
A master storyteller dissects a very English form of secrecy with two stories of the unexpected in otherwise apparently ordinary lives.
Paperback original
"Starred Review. Bennett (The History Boys) finds abundant droll humor in his characters without patronizing them (quite the opposite; he's endearingly sympathetic), and captures the intimacy of a natural storyteller talking directly to the rapt reader." - Publishers Weekly
"Artfully entertaining… On one particular subject Bennett is incomparably brilliant: role-playing, which is the meat of both stories." - Financial Times (UK)
"Bennett's humor consistently resides in the logic of the parenthetical aside, the comedy of the false appearances or misperceptions being challenged or disabused... Mrs. Donaldson is not as unconventional as she thought herself, and no one around Mr. Forbes is where - or who - they pretend to be." - The Guardian (UK)
"Tender and comic… This is Bennett's world, where repression is never far from the sexual act... Good, old-fashioned British humor with the lightest of subversive twists." - The Independent (UK)
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in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Author and actor Alan Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1934. He attended Leeds Modern School and learned Russian at the Join Services School for Linguists during his National Service, during which he attended Cambridge University. He applied for a scholarship at Oxford University from which
he graduated with a first-class degree in History
After some time teaching and studying at Oxford, in 1960 Bennett, along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Cook, achieved instant fame by appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe.
His first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and ...
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