In the Driver's Seat (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780307277565)

A dark, dazzling, surprisingly funny new collection of stories ("Masterly" --Adam Mars Jones, The Observer; "A virtuoso performance" --Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) about single women and wives in various phases of midlife--anxious mothers, besotted mothers, beset mothers--in a (futile) search for security and consolation.

Helen Simpson's stories are short but by no means small. One story takes the Iraq war as its subject; another describes a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer; in another, a simple tale of home maintenance--a woman in a conversation with the carpenter replacing her door after a break-in--becomes a deftly sketched study of grief. In still another, Simpson manages the seemingly impossible--producing laughter at terminal illness and untimely death (this might be the first story in which the amputation of a limb provides a happy ending). And finally, the story entitled "Constitutional"--a pun on one of the word's meanings: a walk taken for the benefit of one's health--deals with memory, family, Alzheimer's, oak trees, pregnancy for the over-forties, stolen photographs, and crossword puzzles.

Helen Simpson's stories move and disturb us as they light up the human gift for making the best of it--whatever it is.

Author: Helen Simpson
ISBN-10: 0307277569
ISBN-13: 9780307277565
Publisher: Vintage
Language: English
Published: 05/06/2008
Pages: 192
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.47lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.18w x 0.62d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 06/15/2008 pg. 24