Imprint
- Virago
- Virago
Virago Modern Classics, Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Classic fiction (pre c 1945), Thriller / suspense
The classic novel - the first she ever wrote - by acclaimed Man Booker Prize-winning author Beryl Bainbridge, HARRIET SAID... is a dark and gripping story of adolescent transgression set in a 1950s seaside resort.
A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches, and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive.
Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences. A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.
Praise for Harriet Said...: A Virago Modern Classic
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An extremely original and disconcerting story - Daily Telegraph
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A sharp, chilling novel . . . The ending has real shock effect - Sunday Times
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Compelling, horrifying, dramatic . . . [a] Molotov cocktail of teenage insecurity and dangerously partial understanding of maturity - Evening Standard
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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