Beryl Bainbridge

Liverpool, 1950. Sixteen-year-old Stella is hired as assistant stage manager by a repertory theatre company and soon falls into a heady infatuation with the director, Meredith — failing to notice how he shows not only no interest in her, but in any woman. When the celebrated actor O'Hara arrives to take the lead in their production of Peter Pan, it...

Freda and Brenda divide the bed they share with a barricade of books, then spend their days working side by side in a wine-bottling factory. A picnic out at Windsor Park for the two women and their colleagues offers promise for Freda and terror for Brenda. Passions run high before coming to a brutal and startling end. With an unforgettably...

A blackly comic story of the secrets, sex, and violence behind the curtain of a repertory theatre's postwar production of Peter Pan: its 'close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction.' (The Times) Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the grey postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theatre company rehearses...