Parlour Games

A London woman's perfect life starts to fall to pieces as her fortieth birthday looms in this "delicious, wickedly funny" novel (Library Journal). Celia has an elegant house, a lovely family, and no major worries aside from private schooling and the misplaced zeal of neighborhood-watch vigilantes. But just as she turns forty, the house of cards starts to collapse around her—as her sister and her friends suddenly turn edgy and fickle; a long-time admirer turns into a crude jester; and Celia spies her husband embracing an utterly ghastly woman . . . "Should be welcomed warmly by readers who devour fiction by satiric writers of the Fay Weldon and Patrick Gale variety. Cheek writes with a particularly brittle and dead-on wit that skewers her subjects, English yuppies who have contrived comfortable lives in the just-right suburb of Bedford Park . . . Cheek's command of absurd situations and her razor-sharp dialogue is dazzling—this is the stuff...