Wounds

Maureen Duffy is one of Britain's foremost writers.

With Wounds [Maureen Duffy] injects into her writing a bitter and convincing compassion. The book is a macroscopic view of south London people, ordinary working class lives which come across with a reality so well defined that the act of reading is likely to send the reader into the middle of Clapham Common or Brockwell Park. People die, accept their inadequacies, express their eccentricities. There is dotty Kingy, a 'poor dusthole fairy', who forces the world to fit her own view, and suffers for it; the West Indian mother, whose demotic speech Miss Duffy catches with great skill, and her son, the archetypal misfit who seeks solace from a theatrical queer knowing that in the end he'll never make it.

The relationships form haphazardly, in working hours: at Maura's pub, mostly, or on the paper round. Only the reader is priveliged to see the jigsaw fit together, deepening their mutual understanding. And the prose matches this, choosing similes that are both powerful and apt, making the whole narrative colourful and poetic. It is a delightful and illuminating book.

Maureen Duffy is a British poet, playwright and novelist. After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in English from King’s College London. She was a schoolteacher from 1956 to 1961, and then turned to writing full-time as a poet and playwright. 
 
Her London trilogy comprises, firstly, Wounds, set in South London during the early period of Afro-Caribbean immigration; secondly, Capital tells the history of London from Neolithic times through tales of Saxon kings, anonymous invaders, the flea that spread the Black Death and the transsexual King Elizabeth; and finally Londoners follows Dante's Inferno, canto by canto, through modern gay London. 
 
Duffy is the author of 33 published works, including seven collections of poetry, non-fiction and 16 plays for stage, screen and radio; she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of King’s College London, a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, and holds honorary DLitts from the universities of Loughborough and Kent. 
A new collection, Environmental Studies, was published by Enitharmon in April 2013 and was longlisted for the Green Carnation Prize 2013.

Wounds begins with two lovers in bed. Their lovemaking throughout the book forms a recurring lietmotif, a counterpoint to the examination of the spiritual death of the characters. 
 
In a South London environment of pub and fairground, home and work, the wounds of 20th century experience are evoked in prose which is both lyrical and precise. Kingy in her garden, ‘loved by the most handsome women in the world’; Maura the barmaid: ‘I prefer the little, thin men'; Glisten the Mayor: ‘It’ll be take-over time and too late’ — these and the many other characters illustrate the basic theme of the novel.

Capital

Roaming from the Dark Ages to the future, Maureen Duffy's classic novel imaginatively evokes London and all its changing histories, characters and textures.

Her subject is London, its past and its fate... A cabaret of voices from the past cut in and out of her narrative as, firm in her locus, she moves back and forth in time. Her city takes on the dimensions of the City of Man - or Woman. I closed the book intending to reopen it as soon as possible to see what I might have missed

Louis MacNeice would have relished the fiction. So will all who care for London

A lone Londoner maps the city, hearing beneath its surface the urgent whispers of the past. As he listens he grows convinced they are predicting London's future. 
 
Meepers, homeless and dishevelled, yet an enlightened and mystically knowing amateur archaeologist, seeks to understand the destruction of London in the Dark Ages, hoping to predict the capital's future. A university historian, writes to his absent wife as he prepares for the start of term. He once rejected for publication a 'crackpot' article by Meepers, and is alarmed to find he has appeared at his first lecture. And now the man seems to be following him everywhere he goes. 
 
In a dazzling mixture of contemporary life and period speech, London is illuminated through the voices of Neanderthal man, Saxon kings, anonymous invaders, the flea that spread the Black Death and the transsexual King Elizabeth.

Maureen Duffy

Many of the Londoners in this novel are outcasts - some are criminals in society’s eyes. Most are descended from adventurers and immigrants. The worlds they inhabit - the bedsit; the cruisers’ pub - lie cheek by jowl with the worlds of the affluent and successful - the smart restaurant, the House of Commons Committee room. 
 
Al, the narrator, is a Londoner born and bred, a writer living in a small room in West London. Most of the other residents in the cavernous Victorian house - and the friends and acquaintances Al meets in tow local pubs, the bohemian and relaxed crowd at the Nevern and the slightly more ambiguous and dangerous crowd at the Knacker’s - are Londoners by adoption, some temporary exiles, some permanent.

Maureen Duffy

Books by Maureen Duffy

Series by Maureen Duffy

The London Trilogy

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter