The Sugar Mother - Softcover

Elizabeth Jolley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140114718 ISBN 13: 9780140114713

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990

Synopsis

Edwin and his wife, Cecilia, are parted for a year while Cecilia pursues a medical fellowship, and Edwin soon finds his life complicated when his new neighbors--a widow and her twentyish daughter--move in uninvited

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007) is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, with a formidable international reputation, and during the 1980s and 1990s was widely acclaimed with a wide readership in the U. S. Born in England in 1923, she was brought up in a strict, German-speaking household and attended a Quaker boarding school. She became a nurse, married, and with three children moved to Western Australia in 1959. Although she wrote all her life, it was not until she was in her fifties that her books started to receive the recognition they deserved. Her work won every major award in Australia, and was several times selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Excerpts from her novels (including Cabin Fever, Book 2 in the Trilogy) were published in The New Yorker. Her novels include The Sugar Mother, Foxybaby, Miss Peabody's Inheritance, and Mr. Scobie's Riddle. Elizabeth Jolley died in 2007.

From Publishers Weekly

Jolley's latest novel (after Palomino) is again set in her native Australia but could take place anywhere. Edwin, a pedantic and in many ways childish 54-year-old professor of literature, has been left a grass widower for a year. His obstetrician wife Cecilia has taken a sabbatical trip to Europe, leaving him to the care of their circle of friends, a group of gently swinging couples. Almost before he knows it, Edwin is taken over by his new next-door neighbors, Leila Bott and her mother, a pandering, inquisitive woman who distinctly resembles Mrs. Malaprop. In fact, they somehow move in on poor Edwin and take over his house. But it is futile to pity him: Edwin is the author of all his troubles. . But it is when Mrs. Bott suggests that Leila act as a "sugar" (for "surrogate") mother that common sense truly flies out the door. The novel is full of unexpected jokes and surprisesone of which is the unconventional behavior of its well-limned, subtly drawn middle-aged characters. The reader is often uncertain about which events have occurred outside Edwin's mind and which inside it, but this doesn't matter: the sheer fun of Jolley's writing and her lighthearted yet serious lesson that not even the old are predictable make this a pleasure to reador even read out loud.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0140114718
• ISBN 13: 9780140114713
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224