Tuesday, February 23rd at 7pm: Stephen Benatar reads from WISH HER SAFE AT HOME

Stephen Benatar reads from WISH HER SAFE AT HOME (New York Review Books Classics), Tuesday, February 23, beginning at 7 p.m. Free reading and signing. Wine and cheese will be served. Grapes, too.

We feel rather privileged to be hosting Mr. Benatar. Some of you may be familiar with the deliciously unsettling tale of Rachel Waring. Having inherited an elegant though moldering house from a senile great-aunt (we all have one), middle-aged Rachel bids adieu to her numbingly predictable spinster’s existence in London and relocates to Bristol.

“I felt now as if I’d never had a real home,” she reflects. Wallpaper is refreshed. Furniture is reupholstered. The front door is painted a yellow “redolent of springtime and daffodils,” up goes a shiny new knocker and mailbox, and dear Rachel is well on her way to having reinvented herself. It’s joie de vivre from dawn to dusk, what with summer lingering, a strapping young gardener toiling away in the garden, and the idea for a historical biographical novel compelling Rachel to splurge on a rather expensive blank notebook and set of biros.

What makes the novel particularly enjoyable is the creeping realization that Rachel is perhaps not the most reliable of narrators. In fact, she might very well be losing her mind. There is, perhaps, a thin line between vigorous fantasizing and pathological self-delusion, and we’re never quite sure to what degree Rachel is straying across it.

WISH HER SAFE AT HOME has been out of print for Far Too Long in this country, and so we’re pleased to see it being re-issued this month in a handsome NYRB Classics edition. NYRB very rarely publishes living authors, and so we’re particularly excited about the prospect of hosting Mr. Benatar this winter.

If you’d like to read a bit more about WISH HER SAFE AT HOME . . .
NYRB’s website here

Asylum Blog’s review here, and

A Write-Up in the Guardian UK here

And some more about the author, from NYRB’s website:

“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. Subsequent works include Wish Her Safe at Home, When I Was Otherwise, Recovery, Letters for a Spy, and Two on a Tiger and Stars, a book for young readers. Benatar has four grown children and currently lives in West Hampstead, London, with his partner, John.”