Michael, Michael

by Wendy Perriam

On a rainy May morning in Oxford, eighteen-year-old Oxford student Tessa Reeves has a close shave with death when Dr Michael Edwards almost runs her over in his scarlet MG. By way of apology, he treats her to a lavish breakfast in a country hotel and over strawberries, steak and champagne, she first experiences his greed – a greed which later culminates in electrifying sex.
Tessa a different world, feels overawed by the pressured mystique of Oxford. But the charismatic Michael - named after an archangel, the conqueror of Satan - boosts her spirits and her status, and fires her own ambition. But after the affair turns sour, Tessa searches with increasing desperation for her lost lover, and later for his surrogate and namesake, the suburban GP, Dr Michael Edwards, with whom she develops a bizarre non-relationship. Love becomes obsession, and her quest for Michael takes over her whole life. On a second fateful May Day the following year, she finds her own fruition in an extraordinary consummation.

476 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’