Smut: Two Unseemly Stories [Hardcover]

'Smut offers plenty of Bennett's trademark pleasures... consistently amusing and full of witty turns of phrase' --Sarah Churchwell, Guardian

'Amusingly peculiar... tender and comic... joyous anarchism... It is good, old-fashioned British humour with the lightest of subversive twists.' --Arifa Akbar, Independent

'Artfully entertaining... The stories have a dark, knowing shrewdness about erotic mischief, young and old' --Simon Schama, FT

'Unmitigated delight' --The Times

'Bennett's talent for the honed quip is securely in place' --Adam Lively, Sunday Times

'Alan Bennett continues to surprise and delight' --Sunday Telegraph

'You can always rely on Alan Bennett to capture the intricate nuances of English Life and his latest offering is no exception' --Good Housekeeping

`Nobody does a finer old gorgon than Alan Bennett ... Smut is a true collector's item ... sublimely funny' --Kate Saunders, The Times (Summer Reading)

`Terribly funny ... you will fall in with him as easily as with an old lover' --The Dubliner

'Small but perfectly formed ... will have you chortling dirtily' --The Lady

`Bennett delivers ... with great finesse' --New Yorker

Unexpected tales from the master of short fiction

The Shielding of Mrs Forbes Graham Forbes is a disappointment to his mother, who thinks that if he must have a wife, he should have done better. Though her own husband isn't all that satisfactory either. Still, this is Alan Bennett, so what is happening in the bedroom (and in lots of other places too) is altogether more startling, perhaps shocking, and ultimately more true to people's predilections. The Greening of Mrs Donaldson Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to take in two lodgers, her mundane life becomes much more stimulating ...

When you are as old as Canon Mollison,' Mr Forbes said patiently, 'one of the few perks of the job is talking to young people about the sexual act. What in any other context would probably get him arrested, in the vestry passes for spiritual advice.

Alan Bennett is one of the UK's most celebrated figures. He is the author of Untold Stories, and numerous works of fiction including The Uncommon Reader. His play The History Boys was the National Theatre's most successful production ever.