Cockfosters

Description

Britain's finest short story writer returns with a sparkling new collection Cockfosters is a funny, frank and forceful story collection dealing with ageing, ambition and the patterns of repetition and renewal found in long friendships and marriages. It opens irresistible new windows onto the world from Arizona to Dubai and from Moscow to Berlin. Turning both a panoramic and a zoom lens on the way we live now, these stories range through hitch-hiking in Bohemian forest-land to cresting the waves of the Aegean to the mending of hearts and the recovery of lost property at the end of the Piccadilly Line. Helen Simpson writes with great warmth, wit and candour about the complexities of modern life, and this new collection shows why she is hailed as one of the best short story writers at work in the world today.

Helen Simpson's sixth short-story collection, Cockfosters, follows Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), Constitutional (2005) and In-Flight Entertainment (2010). A Bunch of Fives- Selected Stories (2012) includes five stories from each of her first five collections. She has received the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M.Forster Award. She lives in London.

This collection is a joy * Bookseller * Helen Simpson is a vital (and pleasurable) voice -- Melanie White * Independent on Sunday * These uplifting and sensitive tales act like a guide to 'the next phase' - whatever that may bring. -- Imogen Lycett Green * Daily Mail * Cockfosters is elegant, sane, and - while remaining firmly rooted in ordinary life - gently ground-breaking. -- Theo Tait * Sunday Times * Over the course of a quarter century, Simpson has assembled a body of work that delivers one of literature's richest accounts of the post-war lives of girls and women. -- Sarah Crown * Guardian *