Darkness Of Wallis Simpson

A wonderful new collection of short stories, most of which are published here for the first time.

Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, ended her life (as the Duchess of Windsor) as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone — friend, foe or journalist — to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, had forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her.

This superb story plays with the selectiveness of memory: why does Wallis recall the seemingly unimportant, while forgetting the glory days of her notoriety? She can remember her first two husbands — one a bit of a brute, the other very boring — but not the world-famous third one.

The other stories in this magnificent collection range over a variety of themes, equally original and unexpected: an East German border guard, redundant after the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989, imagines that he might still have a purpose in life. He tries to reach Russia by bicycling across the hostile wastes of Poland. A jilted man gets his revenge. A baby grows wings. A character in an Impressionist painting escapes from his “frame” — or does he? And there’s a Christmas story set in a seedy hotel.


From the Hardcover edition.

the Sorbonne and is a graduate of the University of East Anglia, where she went on to teach creative writing between 1988 and 1995.

Her first novel, Sadler's Birthday, was published in 1976 and Granta selected her as one of its 'Best of Young British Novelists' in 1983. She has gone on to become a prolific writer of fiction -- including drama and short stories broadcast on Radio 3 and Radio 4 -- and is the winner of numerous literary awards, including the Whitbread Novel Award, which she won in 1999 for Music and Silence, and the Dylan Thomas Short Story Award. Her novel Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was made into a film in 1996.

She is currently working on her next novel, The Road Home, the story of Lev, an Eastern European immigrant struggling to make his way in London, due to be published by Chatto and Windus in 2007.
Rose Tremain lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes.