Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar
Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Wish Her Safe at Home

Author: Stephen Benatar

Narrator: Elizabeth Knowelden

Unabridged: 8 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/28/2022

Synopsis

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city—and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam’s oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.

About Stephen Benatar

Stephen Benatar was born in London in 1937. He has taught English at the University of Bordeaux, lived in Southern California, been a schoolteacher, an umbrella salesman, a hotel porter, and an employee of the Forestry Commission. He began writing as a child, but did not publish his first book, The Man on the Bridge, until he was forty-four. Benatar has four grown children and currently lives in West Hampstead, London, with his partner, John.

About Elizabeth Knowelden

Elizabeth Knowelden is a London-trained actress and an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator who has been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for narration.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Adrianne on July 30, 2014

1.) UH. JESUS. WHAT JUST. THE FUCK? 2.) I didn't pay much attention to the cover when I bought this book. I didn't read the back of it. I got it at a used store, on a complete whim with a pile of other books, knowing that generally, I've loved things that NYRB puts out, and so I was actually more tha......more

Goodreads review by Paul on August 28, 2021

Big cheese lit crit Prof John Carey was chair of the Booker Prize committee in 1982 when this book was submitted. They had a big meeting and he started raving about it to his equally big cheese pals : My fellow judges were all highly intelligent people, whose opinions I respected. But their response......more

Goodreads review by Maria on May 18, 2016

Deliciosa. No puedo decir más. Una lectura que ha sido todo un descubrimiento. Genial! Una historia que consigue hacerte sonreír y... bueno, que te hace ver al ser humano como es! ¿Egoista? ¿Loco?......more

Goodreads review by Paul on May 30, 2016

This was a disturbing novel for me because it made me think about how close any of us are to taking those steps to the door of madness and how easy that walk might be. Add that to the fact that I've known people who didn't seem to be that far away from Rachel Waring, the main character and narrator......more

Goodreads review by Issicratea on May 26, 2015

Wish Her Safe at Home is fiendishly clever and rather unsettling. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything quite like it. Benatar’s novel recounts the inward trajectory of a brittle mind, spinning itself story upon story as a shield against the unpitying realities of lovelessness, ageing, mediocrity, mi......more

Quotes

“This is a most original and surprising novel, and one difficult to forget: it stays in the mind.” Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize–winning author

“I truly loved this book…Such a marvelous work.” Emma Thompson, Academy Award–winning actor and screenwriter

“The story is simple, the implications are complex. Rachel is one of the great English female characters…she is Scarlett O’Hara, Blanche DuBois, Snow White, and Miss Havisham all rolled into one.” Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Benatar brilliantly imagines himself into a tragically compassionate mind for which wild fancy is the only, and proper, antidote to despair.” The Guardian (UK)

“A neglected masterpiece…Brilliant.” Times (UK)

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