Fay Weldon

Offering wisdom on the subject of female happiness and how to achieve it, Weldon explores what makes women happy; how our lives, jobs, families, bodies, morals, and responsibilities affect that happiness, and what we can do to lead more rounded and desirable lives. She also delivers short stories to prove her points.

When Ruth Patchett discovers her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy she become truly diabolic, embarking on a course of destruction which brings those around her their just desserts and herself an amazing reward.

Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations, from prostitute to rape victim, wife to adulteress and eventually becomes the accidental leader of an international women's movement. Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting...

Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is 24, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - worse - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as 'the giantess'. Fortunately, she is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic London publisher to marry her. But, what he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another's child, and will die in childbirth in just a few months....

One of Britian's best loved writers chooses her best short stories from her career at the forefront of contemporary fiction.

Fay Weldon, one of Britain's most popular novelists, delivers a smart and thought-provoking story in what is her final instalment of the Dilberne family sequence. How many parents does it take to make a baby? In the case of Rosalind Melrose Smithson it took four: one birth mother; one legal father; one interfering neighbour and one turkey baster filled with the defrosted essence of an anonymous donor. Or not so anonymous as it turned out. For donor...