The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year
by Sue Townsend
One day Eva, a wife and mother, bolts the front door and goes to bed in the middle of the day. She is not ill. She is not tired. And most definitely she is not having an affair. She’s simply had as much as she can take.
When her husband Brian gets home he’s furious. He can’t get in for starters. And after he is forced to break into his own house he demands to know where his dinner is. Eva shrugs – that’s his problem. His wife, Brian decides, is having a nervous breakdown. He rings his mum.
But neither Brian’s nor Eva’s mother are any help. Eva won’t budge. She even refuses to speak to her children, who have just left home for college. She’s happy sitting in bed chatting to the window cleaner and Alexander, the handyman she’s instructed to refit the bedroom around her.
Why has Eva gone to bed? What’s keeping her there? How will her family get her out of it? And what really happens when the person we love most in the world refuses to be the person we expect them to be?
Sue Townsend, Britain’s funniest writer for over three decades, has written a brilliant novel that hilariously deconstructs modern family life.
Chapter 1
After they’d gone, Eva slid the bolt across the door and disconnected the telephone. She liked having the house to herself. She went from room to room tidying, straightening and collecting the cups and plates that her husband and children had left on various surfaces. Somebody had left a soup spoon on the arm of her special chair – the one she had upholstered at night school. She immediately went to the kitchen and examined the contents of her Kleeneze cleaning products box.
Chapter 2
Brianne was in the communal kitchen and lounge of the accommodation block. So far she had met a boy dressed like a girl and a woman dressed like a man. They were both talking about clubs and musicians she’d never heard of.
