QUEEN AND I THE (The Royal Court Writers) - Softcover

Townsend, Sue; Dury, Ian; Gallagher, Mickey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0413689700 ISBN 13: 9780413689702

Publisher: Heinemann, 1995

Synopsis

The Queen and her family are deposed by a new Republican Government and allocated housing on a Leicester Council Estate. The Queen's husband takes his redundancy badly, her beautiful daughter-in-law copes bravely with the problems of bringing up two young lads alone in difficult circumstances while her sister reaches an understanding with criminal elements on the estate. The Royal Family come to terms with their new situation in a series of hilarious scenes as Sue Townsend's satire, based on her best-selling novel, explores the broken promises of the Welfare State.

About this title

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Heinemann
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0413689700
• ISBN 13: 9780413689702
• Binding: Paperback