The Heart of the Country

'A controlled, satisfying and highly characteristic tour-de-force, astringent and startling' - Financial Times

Fay Weldon's novels are sharp as needles. This latest has such a fine point it almost draws blood

Fay Weldon was born and brought up in New Zealand, and went to St. Andrews University, Scotland, where she graduated in Economics and Psychology. After a decade of odd jobs, she started writing and now, though primarily a writer of novels - Praxis, Puffball, The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil and Habits of the House amongst them - she has also written short stories, radio dramas and scripts for stage and screen, including the landmark TV series Upstairs, Downstairs for which she won the Writers Guild Award for Best British TV Series Script.

At 6.30pm one Thursday, Natalie Harris's world fell apart when she discovered her husband, Harry Harris, had eloped with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978. Natalie is utterly abandoned in the heart of the country, but then she meets Sonia and her life is changed forever. 
 
From the bestselling author of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil and The Cloning of Joanna May.

Fay Weldon

The Rushdie Affair - How it Seemed Then

In 1989, after the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Fay Weldon published Sacred Cows, a pamphlet critical of the fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran. 
 
 Weldon’s pamphlet received a lot of attention on publication – mostly criticism of her perceived ‘Islamophobia’ – but Weldon set out to enforce the notion that no religion should have the right to issue threats and intimidation; no religion should hinder free expression. 
 
In Sacred Cows, Weldon criticizes all aspects of British society – Murdoch and the Sun’s page 3 girls; white, liberal complacence; problems with education and the NHS – and argues that the affront to Muslim people in Britain was not caused by publication of The Satanic Verses itself but rather by the ‘awfulness of the society we have allowed to grow up around us’. The Satanic Verses is remedy, according to Weldon, to a fractured, ailing society. Publishing literature like this proves that our society ‘may yet be well and our brave new God of individual conscience may yet arise’. 
 
Originally published by Chatto &amp; Windus as part of the 'Chatto Counterblasts' strand, this ebook edition is reissued with a new introduction by the author, as part of the Brain Shots series: the pre-eminent source for high quality, short-form digital non-fiction.

Fay Weldon

Books by Fay Weldon

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