The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife

Philip Hensher has been described as "the waspish wonder boy" of English fiction, following the publication of Kitchen Venom and Pleasured. In The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife Hensher proves that he is also rapidly mastering the art of short story writing. The14 stories gathered together in this collection are remarkable for the sheer range of voices, places, moods and tones that Hensher is able to capture in his elegant and seemingly effortless prose. These are acutely observed vignettes of the sheer strangeness of people's lives and their invariably failed attempts to communicate meaningfully with other people.

The opening story sets the Chekhovian tone of the collection, with its account of the strange relationship between a failed painter and his faded Russian émigré landlady, whose attempts at finery leave her looking "like a slow-motion photograph of an explosion in a dairy". In subsequent stories London in the shadow of Thatcherism, ghosts on the internet, 1970s German terrorism, rogue Tory MPs on the loose in Europe and maps of gay life in London all come under Hensher's intense, acerbic and comical gaze. A man draws "a chart of who'd slept with who" with disastrous consequences; a widowed academic has a ghostly experience as he learns the joys of e-mail, "the magical compressor of distance, the instantaneous traveller"; a man wakes up to find himself in a room in Istanbul with a naked man, a briefcase full of money, a sore head and a growing realisation that "the worst thing in the world" awaits him just beyond the door. Hensher is the master of exploring how ordinary events can suddenly engulf peoples lives in extraordinary ways, and then become familiar once again through sheer habit. There is great pathos in these stories of the domestic, intimate minutiae of people's attempts to communicate with others amidst the noise of modern life. This is an absorbing collection. --Jerry Brotton

View other editions of The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife.
View books by Philip Hensher.