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Summary
Summary
'There are two things that you should know about me immediately- the first is that I am beautiful, the second is that yesterday I killed a man. Both things were accidents . . .'
When Midlands housewife Coventry Dakin kills her neighbour in a wild bid to prevent him from strangling his wife, she goes on the run. Finding herself alone and friendless in London she tries to lose herself in the city's maze of streets.
There, she meets a bewildering cast of eccentric characters. From Professor Willoughby D'Eresby and his perpetually naked wife Letitia to Dodo, a care-in the-community inhabitant of Cardboard City, all of whom contrive to change Coventry in ways she could never have foreseen . . .
Rebuilding Coventry is a brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire on modern Britain and the unfinished battle of the sexes.
'Splendidly witty . . . the social observations sharp and imaginative.' Sunday Express
'Nasty, naughty, funny, brash. I found this swift novel a delight.' Joseph Heller
'A satire in the best, Johnsonian tradition, with nothing and no one spared.' New Statesman
www.suetownsend.com
Author Notes
Sue Townsend was born in Leicester, England on April 2, 1946. She left school at fifteen and worked a series of jobs before becoming a full-time author. She was best known for her books about the neurotic diarist Adrian Mole including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years. Her other works include The Queen and I, Number Ten, The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman Aged 55¾, and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year. She died after a stroke on April 10, 2014 at the age of 68.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The author of The Adrian Mole Diaries returns with a screwball farce about life in London. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The author of the British best-seller The Adrian Mole Diaries (1986)--the journals of an almost unbearably precocious adolescent--now offers the extremely uneven adventures of an English housewife who murders a man and hides out with London's homeless population. Forty-ish Coventry Dakin is married to deadly dull Derek, a businessman whose pet tortoises ate his chief passion in life. Not even her two children or the art lessons she secretly takes can enliven things. All changes, however, when she sees her brutish next-door neighbor, Gerald Fox, strangling his wife. Coventry rushes over, hits Fox over the head with a children's plastic superhero--and races away. Fox dies, and the hunt is on. Coventry's face is plastered all over the lurid English tabloids (""Killer Housewife!"") as the police scour London for her. She goes to ground in Cardboard City, a ramshackle few acres of cardboard shanties that are home to the homeless, and there meets Dodo, a young bag-lady who is a member of a rich and politically prominent family. Their adventures include blackmailing Dodo's brother and going on a spree at the Ritz--before Finally skipping the country with fake passports. A sequel seems in the offing. Townsend is best when Waspishly satirizing English ""types"" like the staid Derek, but the plot here is thin and unbelievable, and the social-consciousness forced. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The probable murder of an obnoxious and sexist neighbor with a whack of an Action Man doll is not the orthodox opener expected of a novel documenting social ills. For Townsend, the very unorthodox author of the hilarious Adrian Mole Diaries [BKL My 1 86], it is charming, offbeat, and not at all out of place. A blend of sly, gentle satire and ironic hopelessness infuses this tale of modern England's malaise and provides a subtle nudge to the conscience, its message evident in clever verbal slapstick and sheltered yet culpable characters concretely drawn. When Coventry Dakin observes a neighbor's attempt to strangle his wife, she performs the aforementioned attack and begins to literally run from her suburban cul-de-sac toward London. Instinct leads her to the homeless and destitute of London's Cardboard City, who finally compel her to make a decision about the life she has left and her future in an England that ignores the plight of the neediest of its citizens, lost suburban housewives among them. As with the city that is her namesake, destroyed in World War II but solidly rebuilt more modern than before, Coventry Dakin is the architect of her own life and of a new England, impossible to mistake for the old structures left standing after the fighting had ceased. --Deanna Larson-Whiterod
Choice Review
A week in the life of a middle-aged suburban housewife, Coventry Dakin, provides the novel's narrative frame, which Townsend, author of The Adrian Mole Diaries (CH, Jan'87) fills with her sharply satiric, wonderfully comic and deeply compassionate view of Thatcherland slouching into the '90s. Coventry's picaresque adventures begin when she makes a neighborly attempt to rescue an abused wife from her drunken husband, who is trying to strangle her. Coventry's gesture is accompanied by the death of the husband and Coventry's precipitous flight as an "innocent murderer" to never-before-seen London, leaving behind her own dull mate, two teenage children, and her purse. The ironies created by Coventry's naivete are evoked by Townsend's brisk, street-smart language and exuberant imagination as her heroine, "living off the thin of the land," travels through London society as a bag lady, a street begger, a resident of Cardboard City, and even as an interloper at a Mayfair dinner party. Townsend's satire, directed against inhumanity, moral stupidity, and self-deception at all levels of society, is matched by her compassion for the homeless, the honest, and the eccentric, and explodes into comedy whenever the two worlds touch. A witty, intelligent novel, recommended as a lively read. -J. Sudrann, emerita, Mount Holyoke College
Library Journal Review
There are two things the reader should know from the outset, proclaims protagonist Coventry Dakin: one, she is beautiful, and two, she has just killed a man. The man she's murdered is a lowly neighbor whom she kills by beaning him over the head with an Action Man doll when she spots him attempting to strangle his wife in a drunken rage. She immediately flees to London, abandoning her husband and children and bringing nothing but the grungy cleaning clothes on her back. The life of homelessness and utter poverty she leads in the subsequent week is the focus of this unorthodox novel. She sleeps in doorways, grovels for food, and even prostitutes herself before settling in with the flamboyant Dodo in Cardboard City--the second of the ``two cities'' (the first being ``normal'' London). The story, written by the author of the popular Adrian Mole series for children, is fast-paced and riveting, and, although occasionally verging on the fantastic or didactic, it is worth reading, as it forces us to look closely at what we too often find is easiest to simply ignore.-- Jessica Grim, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.