Beryl Bainbridge

A blackly comic story of the secrets, sex, and violence behind the curtain of a repertory theater's postwar production of Peter Pan: its "close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction." (The Times)) Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the gray postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theater company rehearses for their Christmas performance of Peter Pan. Treading the boards for the first time is sixteen-year-old Stella Bradshaw, ambitious, idealistic, and still overwhelmingly innocent. She falls hard for the rakish, monocled director, Meredith Potter, but, unable to attract his attentions-and not understanding why he's spending quite so much time with their male colleagues-she turns to another colleague to initiate her into the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O'Hara, a dashing leading man who's nursing secrets of his own. When the curtain is up, fantastical entertainment abounds, but backstage a very different drama is playing out: a pitch-black comedy of indiscretion, intrigue, and eventual tragedy. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and dusted with that magical "air of Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice [that] lingers around the margins of [all of Beryl Bainbridge's] fiction," (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author's very best-and best-loved-novels.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Named 'one of the greatest novels of all time' by the ObserverWith a new introduction by Amanda CraigFreda and Brenda are friends spending their days in an Italian-run wine-bottling factory in North London. When a works outing materialises it offers promise for Freda, but terror for Brenda. Unexpected passions run high on the chilly day of liberty and their lives are never the same again. Beryl Bainbridge dazzles readers in this offbeat, haunting yet hilarious novel. 'An outrageously funny and horrifying novel' GRAHAM GREENE'Two very complex, funny female characters. They need each other although they would never admit it' MAXINE PEAKE'Superb... vibrant... profoundly comic' THE TIMES'Few writers offer more control and delight' GUARDIAN

Beryl Bainbridge's classic early novel weaves a dark, clever tale of a young woman in thrall to a golden stranger in 1960s London.

Beryl Bainbridge's classic early novel of English domestic life after the War, A Quiet Life is laced with irony and wicked black humour, and was praised by Hilary Mantel as 'one of the funniest books I have ever read'.

'Extremely lively' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT'A work of art' SCOTSMAN'Genius' SUNDAY TIMESAn old snapshot shows a group of friends lounging in the sunshine, on a weekend in the country at the invitation of bearded, satyric Claude and his wife Julia. The girl in the centre is dreamy Lily, whose latest failed love affair forms the purpose of the weekend, as Lily's friends set out to help her ensnare an unwitting father for her unborn child. Next to her is Norman, a Marxist romantic hell-bent on seducing his milk-white hostess; behind them is old, persecuted Shebah; and slightly apart, the young man on whom all hopes are pinned: quiet, pleasant Edward. Told through the fractured narratives of Claude, Lily, Shebah and Norman, in Beryl Bainbridge's first published novel a darkly comic weekend of friendship and failure unravels.

The classic first novel from acclaimed, Man Booker Prize-winning author Beryl Bainbridge, Harriet Said ... is a dark and gripping story of adolescent transgression set in a 1950s seaside resort.

* The new and last Beryl Bainbridge is a double murder mystery and a bittersweet masterpiece of the kind with which she has made her reputation

* This wonderful novel showing Beryl Bainbridge at her darkly comic best - out for the first time as an Abacus paperback

Beryl Bainbridge at her darkly comic best.

Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Joseph decides to take his mistress and son, together with a few friends, to stay in a cabin in deepest Wales for the weekend - with absolutely disastrous results. Beryl Bainbridge's gift for deadpan dialogue and spare narrative, and her darkly comic vision of the world, are all in evidence in this early novel.

A Bainbridge classic

Quiet and reliable, Douglas Ashburner has never been much of a womaniser. So when he begins an extra-marital affair with Nina, a bossy, temperamental artist with a penchant for risky sex, he finds adultery a terrible strain. He tells his wife that he needs a rest, so she happily packs him off for a fishing holiday in the Highlands. Only, unknown to her, Douglas is actually flying off to Moscow with Nina, as a guest of the Soviet Artists' Union. It is then that things begin to get very complicated indeed...

* A gripping thriller based on a real life event (the Balcombe Street siege)

Paranoid, wilful, lazy, the young Adolf Hitler turns up in Liverpool to stay with his brother Alois and sister-in-law Bridget. Hailed by Alois as a student and an artist, Adolf soon irritates his family beyond measure by his constant sponging and his tendency to get into serious trouble with the English. Surely this is a young man who will never amount to anything.

*'This is one of Bainbridge's best books. The close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction' THE TIMES

Beryl Bainbridge's incredibly evocative novel of the Titanic, reissued with a new introduction.

A wonderful, immaculately researched novel that brings Dr Johnson, his friends and his times to life, reissued with a new introduction.