In a rare foray outside that natural home, Booker Prize-winner Bernice Rubens penned these memoirs 'while I still have a memory'. Poignantly, the highly-acclaimed author, literary bon-vivante and celebrated film-maker died shortly after completing them. She wasn't quite expecting that but nor, as she reveals in these pages, did she expect to become a writer. It wasn't the sort of thing that happened to girls born in Glossop Terrace in Splott, the 'unmentionable and indisputable armpit of Cardiff'. In this delightful evocation of her own life, Rubens escorts us, with a flotilla of anecdotes, away from that armpit through her wartime childhood, her first 'major folly' (studying English at University) to stints as a teacher, lady's maid and actress before stumbling upon a career that bemused her until the end of her days. 'What shall I do,' was her constant internal refrain, 'when I grow up?' Bernice Rubens died in the autumn of 2004.

One day in the desert, Veronica Smiles, a professional explorer, meets God. Apparently she'd called out to Him (at least, that's His story, she hadn't considered Him in years). A relationship reluctantly emerges, however, and as it develops Veronica finds herself enjoying some extremely uncharacteristic situations. Humour and grief are boldly combined in this extraordinary novel.

A novel based loosely on the life of the Turkish-born 17th-century Jew, Shabbatai Zevi. Hailed as the Messiah, forced to convert to Islam, five times married, he is an eccentric and exotic character. In 1970 the author won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Elected Member.

At 'The Hollyhocks' old people's home, the inhabitants are 'waiting for the scythe'. But while they are waiting...Lady Celia is running a blackmailing business on the side, Mr Cross keeps a tally of fellow residents' deaths on the back of his wardrobe, and then there is the rabid old Scots nationalist, and Mrs Green, a woman with a mysterious past. Hardly surprising in this environment that Mrs Bellamy decides she can't take any more and slits her throat. When Matron hushes it up because it would be bad for business, Lady Celia sees an opportunity to expand her blackmailing operation. Meanwhile two new incomers disturb the life of the home further; Mrs Feinberg, a sprightly Jewish woman of whom the other residents are immediately suspicious, and the elegant Mr Rufus. Hidden pasts, unusual sexual preferences and wickedly dark humour are mixed to delicious effect in Bernice Rubens' wonderful new novel.

Product Description Glady's Sperber remains home as one by one her younger brothers and sisters marry and move out, but finally, at sixty, she decides to marry From Publishers Weekly Originally published in England in 1960, this is a bleak rendition of a mother/daughter love/hate relationship by the Booker Prize-winning author (see review of Our Father below). Gladys Sperber, the family "martyr," is the oldest of five "failures" who, because her mother is "too busy," virtually raises her siblings. "She would take her food when the others had eaten. . . . She would wait for their happiness before she felt entitled to her own, and she would have looked after their dying if she'd been able." The title refers to Gladys's destructive symbiotic relationship with her mother: the biblical book of Ezekiel observes that fathers eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. Although the novel, which covers two world wars, evokes the limited choices available to women in a man's world and is replete with manifestations of mother-daughter interdependence (an adult Gladys shares a bedroom with her widowed mother), it doesn't probe the psychodynamics of that relationship. The result is a contrived work that depresses rather than engrosses. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pick his brains - you know it makes sense. Well, what would you do? Your mentor and best friend, herald as the 'greatest novelist of our time', suddenly expires, and you find yourself bereft of a cherished companion's wit and wisdom. Your twelve-year stretch of writer's block, too, now seems like a life sentence. For Martin Peabody, the answer is simple. You remove your dead friend's brain, syphon off his thoughts, and use them as inspiration to revive your career and write a fitting testament to a great man - an autobiopsy, if you like. This superbly sharp and funny novel shows Booker-winner Bernice Rubens at her best.

A story which attempts to capture the fierce heat of the Italian landscape as well as the rhythm of London days and evenings. The author is also known for her novels The Elected Member, Kingdom Come and Five Year Sentence.

From Kirkus Reviews Reading a Rubens novel (Mate in Three, Our Father, Sat on Edge--all 1987) requires an iron-nerved distance. Her cool tales about acrid domestic relations and solitary masturbatory griefs, rages, and obsessions, touched as they are with a bizarre comic irony, cut deep. Here, a London psychiatrist, cold as an arctic bean, germinates an evil seed. Dr. Alistair Crown's wife, Virginia, has just given birth to their first child, named ``Doris'' by an angry Virginia from a card she found in the flowers Alistair brought her--flowers purloined from a cemetery. Alistair is cheap as well as rotten. Doris is born with Down's syndrome, and Alistair will never look at the child's face. But he will touch her body (after covering her face) with what he considers one version of parental love, and then, obsessed, he will draw doodles of an imagined Doris face. Inevitably, Alistair and Virginia separate, and he continues to see patients. (Rubens wickedly skewers the workday of a bored psychiatrist). Into Alistair's office one day comes ``Esau,'' a huge man covered with hair like an animal. Rejected by his father, Esau strips before medical men to reverse his father's withering verdict, and Esau becomes Alistair's gentle friend (platonic). Esau's tragic end preludes another erasure of innocence when little five-year-old Doris is kidnapped. The anguish of temporarily reunited parents and grandparents as hours and days tick by has acid calms and tempests of unrelieved nightmare. The close is predictable, but such is Rubens's skill that the reader must plunge along to the end of a very direful road indeed. A teeth-grinding, chilling tale of human nastiness--in guises that are both horrible and most commonplace. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description Dr. Alistair Crown is disappointed when his wife gives birth to a daughter, but when he learns that she has Down syndrome, he rejects the child