Gliterary Lunches - Food For Thought

Chalcot Crescent
by Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon in top gear: a wickedly sharp, history-bending, cosmos-colliding novel that tells the story of Frances, Fay's never-born younger sister.

It's 2013 and eighty-year-old Frances (has-been writer) is sitting on the stairs of Number 3, Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, listening to the debt collectors pounding on her front door. From this house she's witnessed five decades of world history - the fall of communism, the death of capitalism - and now, with the bailiffs knocking, world history has finally reached her doorstep. While she waits for them to give up and leave, Frances writes. She writes about the husband she stole from Fay, about her daughters and their children. She writes about the Shock, the Crunch, the Recovery, the Fall and the Bite; about the National Unity Government, ration books, power cuts, National Meat Loaf (suitable for vegetarians) and the new Neighbourhood Watch.

The problem is that fact and fiction are blurring in Frances' mind. Is it her writer's imagination, is it just old age, or plain paranoia?

The author

Fay Weldon was brought up in New Zealand. She read Economics and Psychology at the University of St Andrews, and worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London. She later began to write full-time. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE. She lives in Dorset with her husband, the poet Nick Fox.

'Weldon's style, that virtuoso of intelligence and insinuating garrulousness, achieves a kind of ideal equilibrium between therapy and gossip'
The Times

Starting Over
by Tony Parsons

This is the story of how we grow old; how we give up the dreams of youth for something better, and how many chances we have to get it right. George Bailey has been given the gift we all dream of - the chance to live his life again.

After suffering a heart attack at the age of 42, George is given the heart of a 19-year-old - and suddenly everything changes...He is a friend to his teenage son and daughter rather than a stern Home Secretary, monitoring their every move. He makes love to his wife all night long, instead of from midnight until about five past. And suddenly he wants to change the world, just as soon as he shakes off his hangover.

But George Bailey discovers that being young again is not all it is cracked up to be - and what he actually wants more than anything in the universe is to have his old life back.

The author

Tony Parsons is the author of Man and Boy, winner of the Book of the Year prize. His subsequent novels - One For My Baby, Man and Wife, The Family Way, Stories We Could Tell and My Favourite Wife - were all bestsellers. He lives in London.

'Funny, serious, tender and honest... Tony Parsons is writing about the genuine dilemmas of modern life'
Sunday Express

'Memorable and poignant - nobody squeezes more genuine emotion from a scene than Tony Parsons.'
Spectator