Things To Come And Go Av Bette Howland

<p><b>‘Reminiscent of Edna O’Brien, with shades too of Jean Rhys.’ –</b><b> <i>The</i> </b><i><b>Irish Times</b></i><br><br><b><i>Things to Come and Go</i> showcases the incomparable talent of Bette Howland in three novellas of stunning power, beauty, and sustaining humour.</b><br><br><b>‘Birds of a Feather’</b> is a daughter’s story of her extended, first-generation family, the ‘big, brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels’. Esti, a merciless, astute observer, recalls growing up amid (the confusions and difficulties of) their history, quarrels, judgements, noisy love and inescapable bonds of blood.<br><br>In <b>‘The Old Wheeze’</b> a single mother in her twenties returns to her sunless apartment after a date at the ballet. Shifting between four viewpoints – the young woman, the older professor who took her out, her son, and her son’s babysitter – the story masterfully captures the impossibility of liberating ourselves from the self.<br><br>In <b>‘The Life You Gave Me’</b>, a woman at the midpoint of life is called to her father’s sickbed. A lament for all that is forever unsaid and unsayable, the story is ‘an anguished meditation on growing up, growing old and being left behind, a complaint against time.’ (<i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i>)<br><br>First published in 1984, <i>Things to Come and Go</i>, Bette Howland’s final book, is a collection of haunting urgency about arrivals and departures, and the private, insoluble dramas in the lives of three women.<br><br><b>With an introduction by Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of<i> Leave the World Behind</i>.</b></p>