Wounds

Description

Wounds begins with two lovers in bed. Their lovemaking throughout the book forms a recurring lietmotif, a counterpoint to the examination of the spiritual death of the characters. In a South London environment of pub and fairground, home and work, the wounds of 20th century experience are evoked in prose which is both lyrical and precise. Kingy in her garden, 'loved by the most handsome women in the world'; Maura the barmaid- 'I prefer the little, thin men'; Glisten the Mayor- 'It'll be take-over time and too late' - these and the many other characters illustrate the basic theme of the novel.

Maureen Duffy is a British poet, playwright and novelist. After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in English from King's College London. She was a schoolteacher from 1956 to 1961, and then turned to writing full-time as a poet and playwright. Her London trilogy comprises, firstly, Wounds, set in South London during the early period of Afro-Caribbean immigration; secondly, Capital tells the history of London from Neolithic times through tales of Saxon kings, anonymous invaders, the flea that spread the Black Death and the transsexual King Elizabeth; and finally Londoners follows Dante's Inferno, canto by canto, through modern gay London. Duffy is the author of 33 published works, including seven collections of poetry, non-fiction and 16 plays for stage, screen and radio; she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of King's College London, a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, and holds honorary DLitts from the universities of Loughborough and Kent. A new collection, Environmental Studies, was published by Enitharmon in April 2013 and was longlisted for the Green Carnation Prize 2013.

A delightful and illuminating book. -- John Whitley * Sunday Times * Maureen Duffy is one of Britain's foremost writers. * The Guardian * With Wounds [Maureen Duffy] injects into her writing a bitter and convincing compassion. The book is a macroscopic view of south London people, ordinary working class lives which come across with a reality so well defined that the act of reading is likely to send the reader into the middle of Clapham Common or Brockwell Park. People die, accept their inadequacies, express their eccentricities. There is dotty Kingy, a 'poor dusthole fairy', who forces the world to fit her own view, and suffers for it; the West Indian mother, whose demotic speech Miss Duffy catches with great skill, and her son, the archetypal misfit who seeks solace from a theatrical queer knowing that in the end he'll never make it. -- Barry Cole * Spectator * The relationships form haphazardly, in working hours: at Maura's pub, mostly, or on the paper round. Only the reader is priveliged to see the jigsaw fit together, deepening their mutual understanding. And the prose matches this, choosing similes that are both powerful and apt, making the whole narrative colourful and poetic. It is a delightful and illuminating book. -- John Whitley * Sunday Times *