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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : H : Holden, Wendy
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Twentysomething, magazine journalist Jane has enough stress--breaking up with her boyfriend, falling in love with a man who leaves the country the next morning and the spare tyre around her waist--without the added headache of the glamorous socialite Champagne D'Vyne, who pops effervescently into her life and proceeds to sour everything as their lives become inextricably intertwined.Meanwhile, her best friend Tally's crumbling ancestral mansion in Lower Bulge is about to be sold off unless Jane can find a rich knight to come to Tally's rescue and, while she's at it, nab one for herself. The reader is launched into the world of double-barrelled socialites like the Front-Bottomes and Uppe-Timmselves, and the offices of the "Gorgeous" and "Fabulous" magazine worlds where only girls with slim calves and tinted bikini lines get onto the front covers.
Simply Divine sparkles with Wendy Holden's sharp, acerbic wit as she bursts the bubble of high society's extravagant pretensions and leaves the reader choking at some of her more shocking sentiments:
"How could [Tally] see that far? ... This honing of the optics came, Jane imagined, courtesy of the genetic inheritance of generations of Venerys scanning the horizons of their vast acreage. Being grand, however, had its downsides too. Like the girls at Fabulous, Tally had always suffered the most agonising of periods. Blue blood was evidently more painful."
Wendy Holden holds nothing back in her outrageous satire on the rich and frivolous, from psychics to New Age ceremonies to modern, "glossy" bibles, she exposes the shallowness behind the façade --Nicola Perry
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With a wry nod to her own nomination for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award, Wendy Holden's third novel, Fame Fatale, explores what happens when the literati and the glitterati become entangled. Grace Armiger works for Hatto and Hatto, a crumbly old publisher who produce "books that no one reads" by "obscure and unsuccessful authors". When not tripping over Louis de Bernières at literary parties (something of an occupational hazard for all of the bookish types in this novel), Grace tries "interesting uninterested journalists" in Hatto's wares, usually with little success. If her professional life is a mess then her personal life is (surprise, surprise) even worse. Her ardent Marxist boyfriend Sion, the author of the catchily entitled thesis "Why New Labour are Bastards", is not above discarding his principles and his underpants to further his career. A fling with Hatto author Henry Moon, after one too many glasses of Pinot Grigio (Chardonnay is obviously passé in literary circles these days), leaves Grace feeling confused. Her best friend Ellie and diplomat mother, Lady Armiger, are not short of dating advice but her cleaner Maria (who may have just discovered the next Harry Potter) appears to be casting a very bizarre spell on her love life.Add Champagne D'Vyne, Holden¹s stock vacuous socialite (this time she's gone spiritual); Belinda Black, a big-breasted, leather-skirted, tabloid hack; and Red Campion, an oh-so-sensitive (but possibly sex-addicted) movie star and wannabe writer and an array of familiar comic set pieces are in motion. Fans will delight in (and detractors will still hate) the bad puns, bad sex, slim plotting and an ending that is, without giving too much a way, pure Mills and Boon. Holden is never going to be Evelyn Waugh but there's enough satirical bite to this frothy celebrity romp to make it stand out from the crowd.--Travis Elborough
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Wendy Holden's Shell Shock is the companion to a major British television series on the psychological impact of modern warfare. Beginning, conventionally, with the well-known horrors of trench warfare in World War One, Holden plots the relation between war and psychiatry through the different conflicts which have helped to define understanding of military violence and its effects: the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Gulf War, Bosnia. The two world wars dominate the book, and its discussion of the basic paradoxes of military psychiatry: How do you help men, and women, to choose the risk of mutilation and death? Is it "insane" to break down in the face of the carnage and threat of warfare? Using the case histories and painful testimony of numerous veterans and their doctors, Holden offers a broad survey of the war against madness which has become such a key element of modern military life. What emerges--too sketchily at times--is the history of a collision between human attachment to life and limb and the need to become a killing machine, a soldier, willing and able to inflict, as well as to sustain, the psychological and bodily damage of war. --Vicky Lebeau
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Country life doesn't prove quite so simple for the sophisticated city folk in Pastures Nouveaux, best-selling author Wendy Holden's hilarious "comedy of country manors". Although some of the rural inhabitants are poor as church mice, the majority are not and all pursue the same recreational activities (money and sex) as their urban cousins.The belle of the country set is Rosie, a freelance illustrator, who (originally) is not desperately seeking a man, marriage or babies. In fact, natural beauty Rosie doesn't seem to have a problem with men at all. Although she has a partner (Mark is an arrogant journalist whose work involves dishing the dirt on the famous), he is quite obviously unsuitable for such a nice girl. It doesn't take long (page two) before Rosie thinks there must be more to life. So when Mark is given his own column about, wait for it, the travails of sophisticated city folk who move to the hilariously simple "country", she is soon romping with a very mixed set from the nouveaux-riches Samantha and Guy to a farmer fatale and a mysterious millionaire.
Thanks to her previous jobs on national newspapers and up-market glossies, Holden slickly draws her caricatures of urban types from the single-minded financiers, for whom extra-marital sex is a hobby, to their stick-insect, interior design-obsessed wives to vacuous, celebrity-sniffing media types. Champagne D'Vyne, Holden's posh-totty socialite and star of previous tales, even makes a cameo appearance (as herself, nach). If you are looking for a light read, nouvelle literature that won't stretch you too much, read on! --Carey Green
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Country life doesn't prove quite so simple for the sophisticated city folk in Pastures Nouveaux, best-selling author Wendy Holden's hilarious "comedy of country manors". Although some of the rural inhabitants are poor as church mice, the majority are not and all pursue the same recreational activities (money and sex) as their urban cousins.The belle of the country set is Rosie, a freelance illustrator, who (originally) is not desperately seeking a man, marriage or babies. In fact, natural beauty Rosie doesn't seem to have a problem with men at all. Although she has a partner (Mark is an arrogant journalist whose work involves dishing the dirt on the famous), he is quite obviously unsuitable for such a nice girl. It doesn't take long (page two) before Rosie thinks there must be more to life. So when Mark is given his own column about, wait for it, the travails of sophisticated city folk who move to the hilariously simple "country", she is soon romping with a very mixed set from the nouveaux-riches Samantha and Guy to a farmer fatale and a mysterious millionaire.
Thanks to her previous jobs on national newspapers and up-market glossies, Holden slickly draws her caricatures of urban types from the single-minded financiers, for whom extra-marital sex is a hobby, to their stick-insect, interior design-obsessed wives to vacuous, celebrity-sniffing media types. Champagne D'Vyne, Holden's posh-totty socialite and star of previous tales, even makes a cameo appearance (as herself, nach). If you are looking for a light read, nouvelle literature that won't stretch you too much, read on! --Carey Green
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Wendy Holden's Shell Shock is the companion to a major British television series on the psychological impact of modern warfare. Beginning, conventionally, with the well-known horrors of trench warfare in World War One, Holden plots the relation between war and psychiatry through the different conflicts which have helped to define understanding of military violence and its effects: the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Gulf War, Bosnia. The two world wars dominate the book, and its discussion of the basic paradoxes of military psychiatry: How do you help men, and women, to choose the risk of mutilation and death? Is it "insane" to break down in the face of the carnage and threat of warfare? Using the case histories and painful testimony of numerous veterans and their doctors, Holden offers a broad survey of the war against madness which has become such a key element of modern military life. What emerges--too sketchily at times--is the history of a collision between human attachment to life and limb and the need to become a killing machine, a soldier, willing and able to inflict, as well as to sustain, the psychological and bodily damage of war. --Vicky Lebeau