Getting Home

Description

There is only one rule in a suburb - never trust your neighbours. Westwick, the ultimate suburb. Nothing ever happens in Westwick; that's why people live there. Nice people, like Stephanie Sands. Loving husband, adorable son, dream job and a beautiful garden - life is just about perfect for Stephanie until the day her husband is kidnapped. Big mistake, losing your husband in the suburbs. The neighbours turn nasty. The TV totty sees Stephanie as a media victim and the totty's husband sees Stephanie as `lonely' - codeword for desperate. Stephanie discovers that she isn't the kind of woman to take this lying down. Suddenly it's a jungle out there - adultery, blackmail, sleaze in high places and lust on the lawns, until Westwick scrambles the helicopters and takes to the streets with an army of eco-warriors in the hilarious live-TV climax. `Deliciously comic - lightening flashes of wit and scalpel-sharp observation.' Daily Mail `With a sharp wit and snappy dialogue Brayfield has produced a very funny, cleverly plotted novel that displays Fay Weldon's understanding of the pleasure to be derived from seeing the bad get their just desserts' Daily Telegraph

Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. The latest, Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith's She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers. Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France. She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.