Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

First published in 1960, Penelope Mortimer's only collection of short stories lays bare the fury and despair that lurk beneath the surface of everyday domestic life.

A mother and her young son arrive at a rental house in rural France only to find themselves locked out; a fractious family of five try and get through a Saturday at home together; a publisher with a penchant for parties reconnects with an old acquaintance who's the life and soul; and a woman in a maternity ward is an unwitting witness to a disturbing drama behind the hospital curtains next to her.

Sharp, unsettling, and darkly humorous, Saturday Lunch with the Brownings is fiction drawn from life that unerringly captures the complexities and cruelties of family dynamics.