Queen and I - Softcover

Townsend, Sue

3.72

6,439 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141010878 ISBN 13: 9780141010878

Publisher: Penguin UK, 2002

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This is a seminal comic masterpiece of our time, now published for the first time in Penguin. The monarchy has been dismantled. When a Republican party wins the General Election, their first act in power is to strip the royal family of their assets and titles and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging Buckingham Palace for a two-bedroomed semi in Hell Close (as the locals dub it), caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the Queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. But is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else?

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About the Author:

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946. Despite not learning to read until the age of eight, leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications and having three children by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she always found time to read widely. She also wrote secretly for twenty years. After joining a writers' group at The Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, she won a Thames Television award for her first play, Womberang, and became a professional playwright and novelist. After the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 133/4, Sue continued to make the nation laugh and prick its conscience. She wrote seven further volumes of Adrian's diaries and five other popular novels - including The Queen and I, Number Ten and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year - and numerous well received plays. Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She remains widely regarded as Britain's favourite comic writer.

From AudioFile:

Depending on one's position on the British Royal Family, this irreverent account of a drastic reversal in its fortunes will strike you as either hilarious or downright sacrilegious. It's firmly set in English society (with some potentially abstruse cultural references), and the listener has an able linguistic guide and interpreter in Angela Thorne. She does an admirable job recreating both the voices and flavor of family members and their common neighbors. Thorne provides a valuable service to her audience by illustrating clearly the different and separate strata of English society in which language is so much a marker of rank. B.M.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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