Imprint
- Virago
- Virago
Virago Modern Classics, Fiction, Classic fiction (pre c 1945), Romance, Historical fiction
The classic first ever published novel by acclaimed author Beryl Bainbridge, in 1967, A Weekend with Claude is a wickedly funny portrait of frustrated middle-class lives.
An old snapshot shows a group of friends lounging in the sunshine, on a weekend in the country at the invitation of bearded, satyric Claude and his wife Julia. The girl in the centre is dreamy Lily, whose latest failed love affair forms the purpose of the weekend, as Lily's friends set out to help her ensnare an unwitting father for her unborn child. Next to her is Norman, a Marxist romantic hell-bent on seducing his milk-white hostess; behind them is old, persecuted Shebah; and, slightly apart, the young man on whom all hopes are pinned: quiet, pleasant Edward.
Told through the fractured narratives of Claude, Lily, Shebah and Norman, in Beryl Bainbridge's first published novel a darkly comic weekend of friendship and failure unravels.
Praise for A Weekend With Claude
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Extremely lively and incisive entertainment - Times Literary Supplement
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Her genius lies in the comic evocation of the flat and mundane life against which her characters and in perpetual and ineffectual revolt - Sunday Times
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Delicious... very elegant and pleasing... a work of art - Scotsman
Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have all been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.
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