Coupling

by Wendy Perriam

Beattie’s lover Max has given her a very special birthday present – a weekend at England’s most exclusive health farm. But if he had known what was to happen there, he would have bought her a diamond instead.
For thirty year old Beattie, who has always fancied men, suddenly finds herself attracted to a woman – a woman twenty years older, a grandmother, even. Her initial infatuation erupts into a passion which threatens to take over her life as, desperately, she seeks admission into Elizabeth’s inner sanctum – her work as a psychotherapist, her family, her very soul.

456 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 31, 2012

About the author

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

Reviews

[Rachel Chivers · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's a quote from the Daily Telegraph on the front of this book which says "You cannot put the book down ". I disagree. I struggled to pick it up. So much so that it has taken me literally months to get through this book. I've never read this author before and won't be busting a gut to read her again. Dire.