Collected stories

by Beryl Bainbridge

Originally published in 1985, this collection of short stories now contains three more short stories and a novella, "Filthy Lucre". Beryl Bainbridge is the author "An Awfully Big Adventure", "Another Part of the Wood", "Harriet Said", "Birthday Boys" and "Bottle Factory Outing".

Genres: Short Stories

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge DBE was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often set among the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Award twice and was nominated for the Booker Prize five times. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Reviews

[Yve · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Writing was more beneficial an occupation to us than attending a psychiatric clinic, should such a place have existed, and helped to get rid of anxieties nurtured by the particularly restricted sort of upbringing common to lower-class girls in wartime England. It says a lot for my mother that she was always more than ready to clear the table so that I could get down to my next chapter. If I worked for more than two hours she would say, ‘Run out into the garden, pet. All authors must play.’"

Beryl Bainbridge's stories are THE BEST! As she says in her introduction, most of them come from "real life," and fittingly many of them, such as "The Longstop" and "Perhaps You Should Talk To Someone," deal with family communication or lack thereof. But all of them are wonderfully strange. Some highlights are “The Man Who Blew Away” (a truly bizarre religious journey of a man seeing his mistress in Greece), "Mum and Mr Armitage" (turned into a novel which I must read), “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie” (about a man who dies during a pantomime of Peter Pan), “The Worst Policy” (in which a woman tries to arrange an adulterous rendezvous in her best friends house), and “Helpful O’Malley” (who helps tenants commit suicide, of course). The "Uncollected Stories" are also all great.

The last hundred or so pages of the book is a novella called Filthy Lucre, highly influenced by Dickens and Stevenson, which Bainbridge wrote one summer at the tender age of thirteen. It's amusing to read mostly for the extremely serious and melodramatic statements coming from someone so young. It's clear that she was always an odd child.