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Edith Trembath's charming inability to cope with problems of everyday life is a constant source of embarrassment to her friends and family. Unwittingly, she provokes friends and enemies alike, and has a disconcerting habit of not finishing what she is saying. When Edith hints that she has an incurable illness and might soon be departing this world, the lives of her acquaintances become even more complicated. Edith's sixteen year old daughter Corinne falls hopelessly in love with her brother Robert; and Edith's husband becomes involved with another woman. It is left to Filmer, the mysterious gardener, to effect a cure for Edith's malady but his sinister methods are unorthodox to say the least. The delicacy of A. L. Barker's style harbours dark shadows of the macabre, the distressing and the bizarre. 'A quirky, bizarre, earthy book...Miss Barker transfixes ordinariness with her arrowed prose.' Sunday Times 'She writes with witty undertone, stylish, oblique...like a 1970's Jane Austen.' The Observer
About the author
A. L. Barker (1918-2002) was a short story writer and novelist. Born in St Paul's Cray, Kent, she lived in the same milieu where London borders on Kent and Surrey, for the rest of her life. As her Oxford DNB entry says it was 'the chief setting for her work, which often seemed to partake of the quotidian mysteriousness and even abandonment of these areas.'
Her first selection of short stories,
Innocents, won the Somerset Maugham award in 1947. Of her short stories, Robert Nye has written, 'stories as carefully composed as poems, quiet and delicate and reserved perhaps, but oddly lingering in the mind.'
Although a stranger to commercial success, she never wanted for admirers, Jane Gardam, Francis King, Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, John Sutherland, Deborah Moggach, Ronald Blythe, Susan Hill, A. S. Byatt, Adam Mars-Jones, Nina Bawden and Victoria Glendinning being just some of them.
A. L. Barker deserves to be better known. Faber Finds is proud to be reissuing her entire
oeuvre, six volumes of short stories -
Innocents,
Novelette with Other Stories,
Femina Real,
Life Stories,
No Words of Love and
Element of Doubt - and thirteen novels -
Apology for a Hero,
A Case Examined,
The Joy-Ride and After,
Lost Upon the Roundabouts,
The Middling,
John Brown's Body,
Source of Embarrassment,
A Heavy Feather,
Relative Successes,
The Gooseboy,
The Woman Who Talked to Herself,
Zeph and
The Haunt.
Summary
Edith Trembath's charming inability to cope with problems of everyday life is a constant source of embarrassment to her friends and family.
