Description
Near Fine dust jacket illustrated with bottles, pink and white lettering, a mylar dust jacket has been added. The Near Fine binding is dark blue cloth over boards, silver lettering on spine. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.4″ tall x 5.8″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
In this extremely funny new novel, two Englishwomen working at a bottle factory in London with a troop of Italian immigrants become embroiled in a series of antic circumstances and farcical misadventures which the author has masterfully orchestrated into an intelligent and perceptive black comedy.
Freda, big, blonde and eager for a romantic interlude with Vittorio, one of the younger and more handsome Italians working at the factory, befriends Brenda, who (among other scruffy habits) wears newspapers between her inner and outer clothing to keep warm, and can’t seem to say “no”.
It is Freda who decides that the workers in the factory (all men with the exception of Freda, Brenda, and an older Italian woman, Maria) should spend a day together in the country one Sunday. Plans are accordingly made for a picnic in the park, a visit to a Stately Home, and a good time to be had by all. From the moment when the hired van doesn’t turn up at the factory to carry everyone into the country, the outing seems ill-omened. Such an atmosphere of impending doom brought about by pursuits in public places has seldom been created, nor a comparable series of successive denouements, as Beryl Bainbridge weaves her tale with such a genius for the mercilessly comic detail (as evidenced in her previous books, Harriet Said and The Secret Glass), that one hangs on her words from first to last.
Finally, as events rush toward a grotesque climax, the haunting image of the world of the bottle factory workers-a microcosm of the modern urban reality-begins to pervade the reader’s mind like a macabre dream that cannot be exorcised.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
BERYL BAINBRIDGE, born “somewhere around the middle thirties,”` attended the Merchant Taylors School and Arts Educational Schools in England. She is the mother of three children, and was an actress for ten years, but has given up the stage in order to devote herself to writing and painting. Since 1966 she has had five books published and is presently at work on her sixth.
