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A wickedly wry, tender new collection from one of our finest internationally acclaimed short story writers.
Nine virtuoso stories that take up the preoccupations and fixations of time's passing and of middle age and that take us from today's London and Berlin to the wild west of the USA and the wilder shores of Mother Russia; stories finely balanced between devastation and optimism.
In the title story, long-ago school pals take the London Underground to the end of the Piccadilly line - Cockfosters Station - to retrieve a lost pair of newly prescribed bifocals ("The worst thing about needing glasses is the bumbling," says Julie. "I've turned into a bumbler overnight. Me! I run marathons!"); each station stop prompting reflections on their shared past, present, and possible futures ...
In "Erewhon," a gender-role flip: after having sex with his wife, who has turned over and instantly fallen asleep, a man lies awake fretting about his body shape, his dissatisfaction with sex, his children, his role in the marriage ...
In "Kythera," lemon drizzle cake is a mother's ritual preparation for her (now grown) daughter's birthday as she conjures up memories of all the birthday cakes she has made for her, each one more poignant than the last; this new cake becoming a memento mori, an act of love, and a symbol of transformation ...
And in "Berlin," a fiftysomething couple on a "Ring package" to Germany spend four evenings watching Wagner's epic, recalling their life together, reckoning with the husband's infidelity, the wife noting the similarity between their marriage and the Ring Cycle itself: "I'm glad I stuck it out but I'd never want to sit through it again."
"Starred Review. [A]lthough Simpson's stories are timely and rooted in their British milieu - strongly evoking the personal and cultural struggles of today's middle class - they are also far-reaching and timeless, addressing matters of loyalty and mortality that are universal and deeply human. Simpson's stories pack a quiet emotional power that extends beyond their pages." - Kirkus
"This is a loose and entertaining collection." - Publishers Weekly
"So much about this little book is unassuming that one might be tempted to dismiss it at face value, but doing so would be to miss the profound ways universal insights arise out of the ordinary. With Simpson's gift for expertly capturing our human experience, this is one author never to overlook or undervalue." - Booklist
"Wonderful ... Her sixth collection continues to delight with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and delicate handling of weighty subtexts ... A vital (and pleasurable) voice." - The Independent on Sunday (UK)
"Sad, funny, and true ... if Simpson were an American short story writer, she'd be hailed as a genius." - The Independent (UK)
"Exquisitely tender ... A breakthrough collection." - Financial Times (UK)
"Elegant fable-like pieces about the nitty-gritty of middle-class family life...Truthful, funny and sharp ... Elegant, sane, and—while remaining firmly rooted in ordinary life - gently ground-breaking." - The Sunday Times (UK)
"Remarkable ... Humour is never far from the surface ... Joy and its flipside, pain, are frequently glimpsed together ... Simpson has a fine ear for the cadence of everyday speech and for the truths that may lie behind the most mundane of expressions." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Simpson has assembled a body of work over the course of a quarter century that delivers one of literature's richest accounts of the post-war lives of girls and women." - The Guardian (UK)
"Witty, hilarious and deeply discomfiting." - The Spectator (UK)
"A virtuoso of the short story ... Simpon's stories are little miracles that cut straight to the heart of the matter without ever losing their mystery ... Tenderly measured and entirely human. It's this tightrope balance between our outer lives and inner expanses that continues to make her writing sing." - The Guardian
This information about Cockfosters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Helen Simpson was born in Bristol in 1959. She spent five years writing for Vogue. She is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
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Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
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