The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife

by Philip Hensher

From the bestselling author of The Mulberry Empire comes 'a masterly collection of stories! astonishing' Mail on Sunday Like the room from which it takes its title, THE BEDROOM OF THE MISTER 'S WIFE is a book full of secrets, partly revealed, partly concealed. A young couple are destroyed by the simple temptations of the ideal home; a shy Italian ends up in a stranger's hospital room when he rings a telephone number left in his back pocket; after a late-night excursion to Hampstead Heath; Stalin's daughter changes the life of a Cambridge painter with the gift of a fridge; and a German police officer spends a day posing as a terrorist, discovering new possibilities within herself. In this collection of thirteen stories, discrete and contained lives brush up against each other. With unerring precision, Hensher focuses on the small moments when lives alter, his characters enacting their quiet tragedies in rooms and streets which have the crystal clarity of dreamscapes and where banality can assume almost operatic proportions.

Genres: Short Stories

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Hensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School.[2] He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine.[1] He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor, columnist and book reviewer for newspapers and weeklies such as The Guardian, The Spectator , The Mail on Sunday and The Independent.
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.

You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite interesting, some variety.

[Rodolphe Gintz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poursuite de l’opération de « dé-tsundoku-isation » (rien à voir avec la grille remplie de chiffres de 1 à 9…), dans le double filon de la remarquable collection 10/18 et des nouvelles. Ce recueil de nouvelles, un peu datée du début du XXème siècle (la découverte du mail) et so brittish, contient quelques pépites en termes de chutes abruptes – c’est ce que je préfère dans les nouvelles. « Le diagramme » – revisitation sexuelle du concept des six degrés de séparaton de Frigyes Karinthy – ou « Pour entretenir la nuit », qui décrit une chaîne de Ponzi immobilière, en sont de parfaits exemples. Clin d’œil à mes collègues de travail, « Officiel » vous emportera dans une description des séminaires internationaux de la commission des finances de la chambre des communes digne de Jonathan Coe.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is a book of short stories: i have to admit that i'm not a big fan of short stories. these were easy reading and I didn't mind the first few but by the end i found that the recurring theme was pretty distasteful. what I first interpreted as some sort of existentialism turned into selfish characters without trying to think about anyone else around them and going about their own business, whatever it may be. some were just quirky and kinda interesting but on the whole, i decided that I didn't want to read anymore of Hensher's books. oh well.

[Ajit Panicker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you pick up a book without realizing that it would keep you fixated for the next entire day. I could not keep this book down, once i had begun. A great read!