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    Injury Time: A Novel
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    Injury Time: A Novel
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    Injury Time: A Novel
    Ebook186 pages2 hours

    Injury Time: A Novel

    By Beryl Bainbridge

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Winner of the Whitbread Literary Award: A darkly humorous tale about a 1970s dinner party gone terribly wrong by one of Britain’s most renowned authors.

    Edward is normally a cautious man, especially when it comes to his mistress, Binny. But he feels bad that his lover never gets to enjoy the small intimacies of marriage, like sorting his socks or picking out gifts for his family. It is out of this guilt that Edward agrees to throw a dinner party with his “real friends” so Binny can feel more involved in his life and play hostess for a night. But there’s one catch: Edward has to be home no later than eleven to keep his wife from discovering his infidelity.
     
    The invitees to the secret soiree are a discreet couple: Simpson, an aspiring adulterer himself, and Muriel, a simultaneously disapproving and open-minded housewife. But as Binny haphazardly prepares the food, shoos her children out for the night, and frets about the aesthetics of her front lawn, the guests take an unintended detour through her run-down neighborhood. Edward, meanwhile, is silently panicking—and drinking.
     
    Simpson and Muriel finally arrive, and when everyone sits down to eat, it’s already a quarter past nine. Things get off to a decent, if awkward, start, until there’s a loud knock at the door. It’s Binny’s scandalously drunk old friend, Alma, who proceeds to vomit and pass out. But what should be the end of the evening is only the beginning. More unexpected guests arrive—this time it’s bank robbers with sawed-off shotguns. What follows is a chaotic and hilarious series of events, replete with a fake ping-pong match, a baby carriage full of cash, and a delirious getaway. Edward soon begins to worry less about getting home on time, and more about making it home at all.
     
    Equal parts dark comedy and thriller, Injury Time is a witty take on 1970s social mores by one of the most celebrated British authors, Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times.
     
    This ebook features an illustrated biography of Beryl Bainbridge including rare images from the author’s estate.
     
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9781504039406
    Unavailable
    Injury Time: A Novel
    Author

    Beryl Bainbridge

    Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) is acknowledged as one of the greatest British novelists of her time. She was the author of two travel books, five plays, and seventeen novels, five of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including Master Georgie, which went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award. She was also awarded the Whitbread Literary Award twice, for Injury Time and Every Man for Himself. In 2011, a special Man Booker “Best of Beryl” Prize was awarded in her honor, voted for by members of the public.   Born in Liverpool and raised in nearby Formby, Bainbridge spent her early years working as an actress, leaving the theater to have her first child. Her first novel, Harriet Said . . ., was written around this time, although it was rejected by several publishers who found it “indecent.” Her first published works were Another Part of the Wood and An Awfully Big Adventure, and many of her early novels retell her Liverpudlian childhood. A number of her books have been adapted for the screen, most notably An Awfully Big Adventure, which is set in provincial theater and was made into a film by Mike Newell, starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant. She later turned to more historical themes, such as the Scott Expedition in The Birthday Boys, a retelling of the Titanic story in Every Man for Himself, and Master Georgie, which follows Liverpudlians during the Crimean War. Her no-word-wasted style and tight plotting have won her critical acclaim and a committed following. Bainbridge regularly contributed articles and reviews to the Guardian, Observer, and Spectator, among others, and she was the Oldie’s longstanding theater critic. In 2008, she appeared at number twenty-six in a list of the fifty most important novelists since 1945 compiled by the Times (London). At the time of her death, Bainbridge was working on a new novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, which was published posthumously.  

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    Reviews for Injury Time

    3.5/5

    43 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Bleakly, darkly, funny.
    • 4/5
      What a hoot - I loved it! Reminded me of Muriel Spark at her funniest.
    • 4/5
      "There was very little left for her to do. She'd peeled the potatoes, washed the lettuce, sprinkled herb things on the meat. Still, she wanted her daughters out of the way. Being constantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters."I might have to bump this one up to 4 stars because it has stayed with me, and I keep thinking about it. Basically, it's a dinner party gone horribly wrong. The reader sees this coming - it is after all an intimate dinner party thrown by a man's mistress for two close friends that he is not really close friends with. In fact, he has never even met the wife of the colleague that he has invited. This starts off badly and goes downhill from there, and this part is so well done. The awkward dialogue rings true, and the 1970s setting is perfectly captured. It's dark comedy, and the ending I thought was brilliant.
    • 4/5
      Dinner parties… Love ‘em, loathe ‘em – but from the mid 1970s to perhaps as far as the late 1990s they were a symbol of the middle classes. The kitchen-sink drama moved into the Dining Room. Acceptance of your position in the hierarchy by giving dinner parties was soon replaced by competitive hosting – the archetypal example of which is Beverley in' Abigail’s Party'. We tend towards more informality these days, which is a relief to me, but somewhere people are still probably having dinner parties and practising oneupmanship today!…Bainbridge’s 1977 novel, from the middle of her output, Injury Time is at heart, a tale of adultery and an exquisitely ghastly comedy of manners. It is also, to use a footballing phrase that matches its title, a game of two halves – both of which go into injury time.The first half kicks off with us meeting Edward and Binny, he a moderately successful accountant and she, his mistress. Binny is not a typical mistress though, she has three children for a start, and lives in a rather run-down area of North London. Edward is stuck in a stifling marriage with Helen, he’s plump and grows roses. They make an odd pair."In the beginning he had fallen in love with her because she advised him they must live each day as if it were their last: bearing in mind that any moment the final whistle could blow, it was pointless to spoil the time they had left with the making of impossible demands. ‘You don’t want to leave your wife,’ she’d said. ‘And I don’t want you to.’ But as the months passed and she made various disparaging remarks about married men and their duplicity, it occurred to him that possibly this was precisely what she required of him. It made him very uncomfortable."However, Edward does give in to her request to meet some of his colleagues, and chooses Simpson and his wife to invite to a dinner party at Binny’s house. It’s the day of the meal, and Binny needs to get ready, and she’s having problems getting rid of the children, bolshy teen Lucy, and little Alison, who thinks she’s a dog."Binny could feel a pulse beating in her throat. She burned with fury. No wonder she never put on an ounce of weight. The daily aggravation the children caused her was probably comparable to a five-mile run or an hour with the skipping rope."Eventually the children are sorted out and dispatched to friends and neighbours. Edward arrives followed by Simpson and his wife Muriel who seems nice, although proper, and rather an unknown quantity. Simpson, of course, has a mistress too, and keeps trying to think of an excuse to pop out to the phone box."One day, thought Edward gloomily, Simpson was going to be caught out. They were all going to be caught out – Simpson, himself, those other foolish men drinking in public houses, jingling the loose change in their pockets and boasting of affairs. It was astonishing how fashionable it was to be unfaithful."So far, the evening’s going fairly well, but things get interrupted by Binny’s friend Alma who turns up drunk, and promptly throws up all over the place. End of the first half.As you might guess from the cover above, there is something else to come in the second half. By sheer chance, Binny and her guests, find themselves taken hostage by some bank robbers who pick her door to burst in through. I won’t say any more about the seige and what happens next. Whereas before, the novel was broadly comedic concerning: men and mistresses, all the pressures on the hostess of a dinner party, stilted conversation around the table, it now becomes dangerous – very dark, yet still the same – which makes it funny indeed, although there is much underlying sadness.In all the gritty Bainbridge dramas I’ve read so far, many of the characters are damaged in some way, particularly the women. Here, when faced with adversity, Edward and Simpson revert back to being children, becoming objects of pity, while the women actually display some resilience. I didn’t enjoy the siege half as much as the dinner party, but this was another fine and taut novel that has a lot to say about social mores of the time. It won the Whitbread Prize for best novel in 1977.