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Wish Her Safe at Home
- Author
- Stephen Benatar
- Narrator
- Elizabeth Knowelden
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 27 September 2022
- Run Time
- 8 hours 1 minute
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city—and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.
In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam’s oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.
Critics Review
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“This is a most original and surprising novel, and one difficult to forget: it stays in the mind.”
Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize–winning author
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“I truly loved this book…Such a marvelous work.”
Emma Thompson, Academy Award–winning actor and screenwriter
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“The story is simple, the implications are complex. Rachel is one of the great English female characters…she is Scarlett O’Hara, Blanche DuBois, Snow White, and Miss Havisham all rolled into one.”
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
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“Benatar brilliantly imagines himself into a tragically compassionate mind for which wild fancy is the only, and proper, antidote to despair.”
The Guardian (UK)
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“A neglected masterpiece…Brilliant.”
Times (UK)
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Stephen Benatar
- Narrator
- Elizabeth Knowelden
- Duration
- 8 hours 1 minute
- Release Date
- 27 September 2022
- ISBN
- 9798212001090
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Interior life
Synopsis
Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city—and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam’s oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.
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