Cuckoo

Description

Frances is on a fertility drug and sizing up the milkman. Charles is struggling between shocked disapproval and guilty desire for his own illegitimate daughter - a fifteen-year-old secret who arrives and takes over the nest. Their sterile and rule-ridden marriage (where even sex requires timetable and rule-book) begins to fall apart. In desperation, Frances seeks an escape-route, in a wild attempt to change the cold climate of her life. In this tragic-comic study of relationships in conflict, Perriam reflects on freedom in all its different aspects, ranging motherhood against emancipation, teenage rebellion against middle-aged repression, and sexual abandonment against puritan restraint. She also makes us laugh. Cuckoo is extremely funny, though in Perriam's work we are often laughing at ourselves and the sad lunacy of the way we run our lives. By the end of this explosive novel, the cuckoos - and the cuckolds - are clearly coming home to roost. `Devilishly entertaining and surprisingly touching' Sunday Express `Perriam is a writer of authority and skill, with a wicked ear for conversational quirks' Sunday Times

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first 'novel' at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan's power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist's model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column. Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences -- strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam -- have helped shape her as a writer. 'Writing allows for shadow-selves. I'm both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.'