Parlour Games

By: Mavis Cheek

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Synopsis: A London woman’s perfect life starts to fall to pieces as her fortieth birthday looms in this “delicious, wickedly funny” novel (Library Journal). Celia has an elegant house, a lovely family, and no major worries aside from private schooling and the misplaced zeal of neighborhood-watch vigilantes. But just as she turns forty, the house of cards starts to collapse around her—as her sister and her friends suddenly turn edgy and fickle; a long-time admirer turns into a crude jester; and Celia spies her husband embracing an utterly ghastly woman . . . “Should be welcomed warmly by readers who devour fiction by satiric writers of the Fay Weldon and Patrick Gale variety. Cheek writes with a particularly brittle and dead-on wit that skewers her subjects, English yuppies who have contrived comfortable lives in the just-right suburb of Bedford Park . . . Cheek’s command of absurd situations and her razor-sharp dialogue is dazzling—this is the stuff of which the finest English screwball comedy films used to be made. Even the minor players, from the nosy, haughty cleaning lady to assorted friends and lovers, are richly drawn and perfectly cast.” —Publishers Weekly “A very funny book—one of those rare books that make you laugh out loud. Imagine the wicked social observation of Jilly Cooper mixed with the needle wit of Fay Weldon and you’ll get the picture.” —New Woman