Gone with the Windsors - Softcover

Graham, Laurie

3.76

863 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007146760 ISBN 13: 9780007146765

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2006

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About the Author:

Laurie Graham is the author of eight novels. `The Ten O'Clock Horses' was shortlisted for the Encore Award and dramatized for Radio 4, as was `Perfect Meringues'. Laurie is a former Daily Telegraph columist and contributing editor to She magazine, and wrote the bestselling `Parents' Survival Guide'. In addition to her novels, she writes original dramas and adaptations for BBC Radio. Her ten-episode dramatization of `Little Women' was broadcasted on Woman's Hour.

From Publishers Weekly:

The diary entries of shallow and oblivious Baltimore socialite Maybell Brumby comprise Graham's fourth novel, which explores the fictional lives of intimates involved in the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII. Maybell, widowed by her older husband, leaves for London in 1932 to join her sister Violet and falls in with her school friend Bessie Wallis "Wally" Simpson, the married woman (twice, in fact) who has set her sights on the then Prince of Wales. Through Maybell's American patricianism, Graham (The Future Homemakers of America) skewers the tedious royal family and their aristocratic hangers-on. Maybell's self-absorption and dim-wittedness make her endearing at odd moments (as when she learns that her other sister, "Doopie," is deaf rather than mentally handicapped); her chatty tone is grating when the action—primarily Wally's plotting, conquest and royal assumption—slows. Graham depicts the abdication as a kind of bedroom farce and uses Maybell's ignorance to add ambiguity to the controversial relationship of the duke (as he is known after abdication) and Wally to the Nazi regime. As WWII becomes imminent, the leisured friends must make a run for it, and the partings are not all amicable. This light romp through sordid territory is sly, gossipy fun. (Aug.)
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