From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. It left me with very mixed feelings about Ellen, whilst she was in France I wanted to go up on her, shake by the shoulders and tell her not to be so stupid but whilst in the UK I wanted to give her a big hug. A week into her leave, a male friend she’s known for about a year drops by and kisses her in the garden. An article published on the occasion of her 90th birthday ends like this: “There is still the hope too of one final book: “I do have one in mind but I’m not sure I have the energy or the existence to carry me through,” she says with a hint of regret.

With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. Edna O’Brien is an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories, has been hailed as one of the greatest chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. It’s also a fascinating insight into a woman’s interior life, her sexual desires and her hunger to live life to the fullest. It was like a kick to the stomach and suddenly the whole story took on a different purpose and became so much more than I had imagined at the start.She has also received, among other honors, the Irish PEN Award for Literature, the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin, and a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Literary Academy. If you want to see how a masterful author can develop a character so real seeming that you want to befriend, help, and guide her, this book does that and more. Separated from her husband, Ellen finds herself living alone in a city she dislikes - a place that denies her past and offers no hope for her future.

There, she meets all sorts of people including lesbians and gay men but she realizes that she is not really looking for sex because she does not get interested even on a good-looking actor.So, I splurged and found myself a lovely first edition of this book, a hardcover which smells like the 1960s, which is just when this novel happened to have been written by Irish author, Edna O'Brian.

It's been 4 days and this short book put me in a reading slump, so it, indeed, fulfills the promise of making August a wicked month. She wants every man she meets to be enthralled to her, yet makes little effort to make herself interesting in any way. For a while, I thought maybe O'Brien was showing the emptiness of a life based on liquor, sex, and celebrity. She escapes to the French Riviera and meets a new range of people, all the time realising that she is yearning for something that cannot be experienced through meaningless sex. Otherwise, I would have wondered if the Wicked Witch of the East would have some kind of sexual prowess or power as a witch too.They goto a burlesque show and the flirting and innuendos continue but Ellen is really only interested in the actor. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. The language has a slow, langurious quality to it, in which everything seems to be happening in the half-realized manner of a dream, interspersed with the frenetic quality of extreme loneliness. The reader will want to get into the book, grab Ellen by the shoulders, and shake some sense into her while she’s in France and then will want to comfort her once she is home. A short novel, it is nevertheless jam-packed with the O'Brien's trademark haunting prose - in her best works ( House of Splendid Isolation, In the Forest), her trance-like writing is both comforting and harrowing - often at the very same time.

A Woman of my Age’ by Nina Bawden: A woman begins to question everything about her life and her marriage when she goes on holiday to Morocco with her husband.Back at home front, a tragedy strikes and the husband, not knowing where his wife is, does the thing on his own.