Mary Wesley, Author Overlook Press $14.95 (128p) ISBN 978-0-87951-524-9
Life grows very interesting indeed for British sisters Kate and Angela when Kate's beloved pet bullfinch, Mr. Bull, reveals that he and all the other local birds and beasts speak fluent English. Together, the girls and Mr. Bull set out to rescue all
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Mary Wesley, Author Penguin Books $12.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-14-010827-9
Late-bloomer Wesley published this first novel in Britain at the age of 70a fact that explains the breadth of experience reflected here. As a practical decision, Matilda Poliport, middle-aged and recently widowed, is preparing at the story's outset...
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Mary Wesley, Author Penguin Books $11.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-14-010828-6
Wesley (see review above) is considerably less successful with this tepid romance, which opens with two events: Poppy Carew's thoroughly detestable lover, Edmund, leaves her for a richer woman; and her father dies. The three men who are to become...
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Mary Wesley, Author Penguin Books $7.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-14-011947-3
Beautiful, independent and brazenly manipulative, 40-ish Laura Thornby plays muse to 23-year-old aspiring novelist Claud Bannister in ``Wesley's mordantly humorous take on upper-middle-class British life,'' remarked PW. (July)
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Mary Wesley, Author Penguin Books $14 (368p) ISBN 978-0-14-013436-0
Abandoned by her parents in a Brittany resort town in 1926, 10-year-old Flora Trevelyan is taken in by vacationers and falls in love with her three adolescent protectors. ``Wesley's most engaging and memorable novel so far, this finely nuanced story
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Mary Wesley, Author Overlook Press $14.95 (156p) ISBN 978-0-87951-470-9
This gentle fantasy by the critically acclaimed author of adult novels gets off to a promising and appropriately fanciful start: on Derby Day, Lisa places a large bet (the entire proceeds of her artist father's sold-out show) on a horse running at...
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Mary Wesley, Author Overlook Press $14.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-87951-506-5
British novelist Wesley ( A Sensible Life ; the YA fantasy Haphazard House ) brings a quirky and graceful sensibility to this tale set in the English countryside in the near future. An unspecified disaster has wiped out much of the world's...
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Mary Wesley, Author Penguin Books $10.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-14-024749-7
A mordant comedy of manners from English novelist Wesley about three strangers whose lives intersect through an unusual occurrence on board a London commuter train. (Apr.)
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Mary Wesley, Author Viking Books $22.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-670-87363-0
Octogenarian Wesley's novels are distinguished by her sharp eye for human frailties and the ironies of fate, and by her witty and incisive prose. If her last novel, An Imaginative Experience, was a bit mean-spirited and cynical, she almost...
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Mary Wesley, Author Viking Books $17.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-670-82121-1
From a witty septuagenarian novelist of British upper-middle-class life (Harnessing Peacocks, The Camomile Lawn) comes this amusing story of a widow remembering her boring marriage and the man she really loved. The heroine is newly widowed Rose Peel
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Mary Wesley, Author Viking Books $18.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-670-82693-3
Septuagenarian Wesley continues to produce lively, satiric sexual comedies, although her latest effort has a somewhat darker tone than The Vacillations of Poppy Carew and Not That Sort of Girl , some of whose characters also turn up here. Having...
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Mary Wesley, Author Viking Books $21 (272p) ISBN 978-0-670-84672-6
There is more than one legacy in British author Wesley's ( A Sensible Life ) darkly comic, wise and irresistible new novel of manners. Henry Tillotson's legacy from his dying father is an injunction to help an English divorcee in WW II Egypt. Henry...
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Mary Wesley, Author Viking Books $21.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-670-85649-7
Those who relished Wesley's A Sensible Life and the seven other novels in which she displays her tart tongue, mordant humor and laser eye for human foibles, may be a bit taken aback by her latest effort. Compared to her previous work, this novel is...
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Mary Wesley, Author Scribner Book Company $16.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-684-18637-5
So disarming is this novel by the author of The Camomile Lawn, that its spoof of a plot and its spiral of coincidence don't matter a bit. It concerns Hebe Rutter (Hebe, messenger of the gods, the peacock-harnesser of the title), chef extraordinaire...
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Mary Wesley, Author Viking Books $18.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-83338-2
Wesley's ( Not That Sort of Girl ; Second Fiddle ) most engaging and memorable novel so far, this finely nuanced story features an enchanting heroine, the social settings at which the British author excels and her usual keen observation of character.
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