Perriam, Wendy list

Wendy Perriam

Wendy Perriam has had more than 16 novels published to critical acclaim. Expelled from her convent boarding school for heresy, she read history at Oxford and later trod the boards. After a variety of jobs, from artist's model to carnation debudder, she embarked on a career in advertising, writing in her spare time. In 1980 she became a full-time novelist. Wendy lives south-west of London.


Wendy Perriam's titles		ISBNs


After Purple Born of Woman The Stillness The Dancing Devils, for a Change Fifty-Minute Hour Bird Inside Michael, Michael Breaking and Entering		1-903552-02-8 1-903552-03-6 1-903552-04-4 1-903552-06-0 1-903552-07-9 1-903552-09-5 1-903552-10-9 1-903552-11-7


After Purple to top For Thea Morton, sex and religious experience are one. This out-of-work, out-of-luck ex-convent girl is both an ecstatic St Teresa and modern Wife of Bath, forever hoping to bump into God in a final blissful orgasm turning slattern into Soul. So when she meets Ray Murphy, an intense ascetic Franciscan friar, with red hair and green socks, she regards him as the obvious route to the Godhead. To seduce Ray would be a miracle, so she pursues him to Lourdes ... Purple is the colour of passion, penance and panache, and After Purple is a highly coloured story of sex, religion and violence, combining wild outrageous comedy with an impassioned quest for God.


Born of Woman to top Wendy Peniam’s scintillating epic on modern woman and the war between the sexes... Driven apart by the sensational publication of Hester Winterton’s highly intimate diaries, her son Lyn and his wife Jennifer embark on separate voyages of discovery. While Jennifer is swept reluctanfly as the second Mrs Winterton into a glamorous round of publishing parties and television interviews, Lyn is impelled to face past secrets and to probe his relationships with those forbidden arousing creatures known as women... Through a compelling and ingenious plot which stretches from the world of London razzmatazz to the snowy wilds of Northumbria, Perriam entertains and moves us with an exhilarating novel which includes tragedy, comedy and exuberant sexuality.


The Stillness the Dancing to top Abandoned by God and her husband, the twin props of her existence, Moma Gordon has tried to live her life through her mother and daughter, both plunged in crises of their own. But the priest’s words stir something in her soul, and meeting David a man who believes passionately in souls stirs something more profound. Emerging from her anger and bewilderment, she embarks on a voyage of self-discovery, which takes her from lunacy of anything-goes California, to a remote northern island and another century, to the fulfilment of scholarship and finally to furious, fumbling but intoxicating love. Exploring the lives of three generations of women with sensitivity and perception, The Stillness The Dancing juxtaposes humour with tragedy, sex with mysticism, faith with doubt, the grab-all twentieth century with the hairshirt idealism of the Age of Saints in a giant lifescape of a novel.


Devils, for a Change to top After twenty cloistered years in a Norfolk convent, Sister Mary Hilary casts off the spiritual straitjacket of her medieval robes and returns to a world she can hardly recognize — one which is permissive, greedy, and amoral. Used to a life spent contemplating the mysteries of Christ —where ‘self’ is the enemy — she comes naked into the modern world, groping her way towards the as yet untasted pleasures of friendship, sensuality and love. But is Hilary ready for life outside the womb of the Mother Church — and can she ever be free from her burden of guilt and fear? Devils, for a Change, in which the modern world is seen through the eyes of an innocent outsider, is at once profoundly revealing of human weakness and unabashedly life-affirming.


Fifty-Minute Hour to top Eccentric psychoanalyst John-Paul becomes a terrifying object of obsession for three of his patients in their fifty-minute sessions on his couch. Nial, a prostitute with gender problems, swaps sex for the blood-drenched dreams of an ex-Nazi butcher in the High Street. Mary, a conventional housewife, stockpiles stallion-size vibrators. Brian, an Oedipal clerk, takes his snake to bed and dreams of parcelling up his mother and posting her off to far-flung islands with useless postal systems so she cannot be returned. All seek help and healing from the mysterious John-Paul, but is he sage and saviour, or untrained, unlicensed con-man?


Bird Inside to top Jane’s whole world is overturned at her eighteenth birthday party. She flees her home, disoriented, and finds refuge with Christopher, a stained-glass artist more than forty years her senior who is working on a Resurrection window. As the window takes shape, Jane tries to rebuild her own life, examining the beliefs of all those she meets: chaotic cosy Isobel, whose motherly exterior conceals a girlhood tragedy; wealthy tormented Adrian, who uses his private chapel as a leisurecentre and sees God as Chairman of the Board; Hadley, who believes in melting down stained glass to make soup for London’s tramps; Christopher himself, selfish and charismatic, the promiscuous philosopher whose art is his religion and who regards sex as a ‘taste of the immortal’...


Michael, Michael to top Oxford. May Morning. Pouring rain. Eighteen-year-old student Tessa Reeves has a close shave with death as Dr Michael Edwards comes hurtling round the corner in his scarlet MG. By way of apology, he treats her to a lavish breakfast in a country hotel, and over strawberries, steak and champagne she first experiences his greed a greed which later culminates in electrifying sex. Tessa, from the wrong side of the tracks, brought up with no frills and no father, feels overawed by the pressured mystique of Oxford. The charismatic Michael boosts her spirits and her status, and fires her own ambition. But it is darkness which descends as the affair turns sour and Tessa searches in increasing desperation for her lost lover, and later for his surrogate and namesake, the suburban GP, Dr Michael Edwards, with whom she develops a bizarre non-relationship. Spellbound, her love becomes an obsession, and her quest for Michael Michael takes over her whole life.


Breaking and Entering to top Daniel has reached the dangerous age of forty and has just embarked on his first affair a source of mingled guilt and ecstasy. His wife Penny seems unaware, but, worryingly, Pippa, his 13-year-old stepdaughter, has stopped speaking. The pressures slowly build, until at last Daniel agrees to visit a Welsh healer who has set up camp on the site of a derelict lead-mine in one of the remotest parts of Wales. In a dramatic climax, father, daughter and healer are finally reconciled as Daniel exchanges his narrow view of life for one more open to mystery and the numinous, and at last understands the healer's words about grace ‘breaking and entering’ his soul.