From Publishers Weekly
Organized around the lives of four women who participate in a high-pressure course in salesmanship, this is a tightly written, expertly plotted and highly intelligent novel by the British author of Benefits and Here Today. Fairbanks focuses on how the lives of her heroines, including their relationships with husbands and lovers, are changed, subtly or convulsively, by the aggressive program. There's Daphne, the course's trainer and something of a sergeant major, who has little time for a private life; Gina, an ambitious know-it-all who tries to be career woman, wife and mother simultaneously but falls prey to a female competitor's violence; Ann, a housewife into whose life come unexpected excitements and challenges; and Teresa, owner of a feminist magazine who has a hard time steering her way between "rocks of finance and whirlpools of ideology." Fairbanks speaks directly and perceptively to the condition of contemporary women torn by the conflicting demands of career and confusing psychosocial status. She's a novelist to be reckoned with.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
With skill and humor, Fairbairns shows the lives and status of women in today's Britain in this fourth novel that centers on four women who meet at a business seminar. Gina is young, bright, and upper class; Ann is a middle-aged widow from the working class; Teresa is a feminist running a struggling radical feminist magazine; and Daphne, the course instructor, is on the way up and indifferent to how she gets there. Fairbairns cuts between the four women's lives after the seminar has ended and shows how their careers, families, and loves are affected. Extremely pleasant reading that will especially delight Anglophiles. Janet Boyarin Blundell, M.L.S., Brookdale Coll., Lincroft, N.J.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
