A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion--"her
style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel"
(Rachel Cooke, The Observer)
Bourgeois housewife Ruth Whiting is "paralysed by triviality," measuring
out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge
parties--routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her
husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old
Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. Then Angela
accidentally falls pregnant, and Ruth must keep her own past from
repeating itself.
First published in 1958, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with
its "feminine rage" (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a
repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a
mother and daughter who must join forces in a man's world.