This 1973 novel is set in wartime Liverpool, a place of emotional repression. The narrative centres on a naive and passive young girl, Rita, who falls in love with an American GI. In typical Bainbridge style, the consequences are violent and tragic. According to Mavis Cheek, “What makes The Dressmaker so easily readable is that underpinning the spareness and the bleak, funny prose is her ability to tell a story. The narrative whips along, there are no sidetracks, no grace notes of writing style; it is simply a story told through characters and situations that feel entirely real. This world existed and Bainbridge knew it.”
Inspired by Bainbridge’s own experiences of working in a bottling plant, this 1974 work concerns Brenda and Freda, who work together in a factory and share a grim bedsit. Their lives are changed forever after a work outing in a novel that is at once haunting and hilarious. It was selected by Robert McCrum of the Observer as one of the 100 greatest books of all time.
An Awfully Big Adventure is a dark coming of age story set in 1950s Liverpool. It follows 16-year-old Stella Bradshaw who, having volunteered for a Christmas production of Peter Pan, becomes obsessed with the dissolute theatre troupe. In 1995 it was made into a film starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant.
Though Booker success eluded Bainbridge, this 1996 novel was awarded the Whitbread Prize and The Guardian Fiction Prize. The novel is narrated by Morgan, an Anglo-American aristocrat and passenger aboard the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Bainbridge weaves mysterious characters with revelations about Morgan’s past against the backdrop of inevitable disaster. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Kaye said: “It is difficult to imagine a more engrossing account of the famous shipwreck than this one.”
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