Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

Description

A mother and her young son arrive at a rental house in rural France only to find themselves locked out; a fractious family of five try and get through a Saturday at home together; a publisher with a penchant for parties reconnects with an old acquaintance who's the life and soul; and a woman in a maternity ward is an unwitting witness to a disturbing drama behind the hospital curtains next to her. Sharp, unsettling, and darkly humorous, Saturday Lunch with the Brownings is fiction drawn from life that unerringly captures the complexities and cruelties of family dynamics.

Penelope Mortimer (1918-1999) was born in Wales. In 1947 her first novel, Johanna, was published and she began writing for The New Yorker. Mortimer wrote nine novels, including Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1958) and two volumes of memoir. Her best-known work, the semi-autobiographical novel The Pumpkin Eater (1962), was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and made into a film starring Anne Bancroft.