Editions

Friends And Relations

Friends And Relations

Two sisters, two weddings, just months apart. These marriages produce a tangle of friends, relations and lovers that starts to unravel ten years later, during one intense week. Two of Bowen’s most memorable characters are in attendance: Lady Elfrida, a creature of privilege, and Theodora Thirdman, a gawky teenager with zero self-awareness. The sunset of prosperity is upon this complacent, moneyed class, but Bowen’s precise and beautiful prose pins real pain and comedy upon its inhabitants.

Reviews

  • "Bowen is a tough old bird. And once you're on her side, it's going to be a loyal alliance. Because it's nice to have a writer who will never lie to you. Not even to make you feel a little better"

    Kirkus

  • "Bowen wrote numerous great novels, including Friends and Relations...about how telephones have infiltrated our thinking and desires: waiting for a call, being interrupted by a call, not knowing what might be announced"

    Guardian

  • "There is much to savour, enjoy, intrigue and shock in this wonderful novel. Bowen is sublime"

    Book Snob

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About the Author

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

Elizabeth Bowen

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