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Amazon.co.uk Review
The opening story sets the Chekhovian tone of the collection, with its account of the strange relationship between a failed painter and his faded Russian émigré landlady, whose attempts at finery leave her looking "like a slow-motion photograph of an explosion in a dairy". In subsequent stories London in the shadow of Thatcherism, ghosts on the internet, 1970s German terrorism, rogue Tory MPs on the loose in Europe and maps of gay life in London all come under Hensher's intense, acerbic and comical gaze. A man draws "a chart of who'd slept with who" with disastrous consequences; a widowed academic has a ghostly experience as he learns the joys of e-mail, "the magical compressor of distance, the instantaneous traveller"; a man wakes up to find himself in a room in Istanbul with a naked man, a briefcase full of money, a sore head and a growing realisation that "the worst thing in the world" awaits him just beyond the door. Hensher is the master of exploring how ordinary events can suddenly engulf peoples lives in extraordinary ways, and then become familiar once again through sheer habit. There is great pathos in these stories of the domestic, intimate minutiae of people's attempts to communicate with others amidst the noise of modern life. This is an absorbing collection. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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From the bestselling author of The Mulberry Empire comes ‘a masterly collection of stories… astonishing’ Mail on Sunday
Like the room from which it takes its title, THE BEDROOM OF THE MISTER 'S WIFE is a book full of secrets, partly revealed, partly concealed. A young couple are destroyed by the simple temptations of the ideal home; a shy Italian ends up in a stranger's hospital room when he rings a telephone number left in his back pocket; after a late-night excursion to Hampstead Heath; Stalin’s daughter changes the life of a Cambridge painter with the gift of a fridge; and a German police officer spends a day posing as a terrorist, discovering new possibilities within herself.
In this collection of thirteen stories, discrete and contained lives brush up against each other. With unerring precision, Hensher focuses on the small moments when lives alter, his characters enacting their quiet tragedies in rooms and streets which have the crystal clarity of dreamscapes and where banality can assume almost operatic proportions.
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