THE WEEKEND

CHARLOTTE WOOD

Weidenfeld, 275pp, £14.99, ebook £7.99

The Weekend is an Australian novel about the relations between three seventy-something friends and a missing fourth, who has been dead a year. The remaining three have arranged to spend Christmas together, cleaning out the beach house of the dead one as an act of kindness to her grieving (female) partner. Along with the rubbish which they clear out they revisit old quarrels and discover a secret which makes them question their friendships with one another.

Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times hailed it as a ‘quietly radical tragicomedy’ and described herself ‘shocked by how unusual it felt to spend 275 pages exclusively in the company of older women’. Notwithstanding some melodrama in the plot, and some ‘automatic overwriting’ in the prose, Lowdon admired the surefootedness with which Wood ‘packs 50 years into one weekend’.

Susan Wyndham in the Guardian described The Weekend as a playful and moving feminist fairytale which would surprise admirers of The Natural Way of Things, Wood’s best-selling novel about a disparate group of young women imprisoned in the Australian desert to protect their sexual abusers. Sara Collins in the Observer also noted that The Weekend was ‘rooted in more quotidian realities’ than the previous book but added that it was also ‘steeped in symbolism’. This is mainly provided by the elderly dog which ‘totters in and out of almost every scene: feeble, befuddled and incontinent’.

What Sara Collins really admired, though, was that ‘each of its protagonists is still adamantly (often disastrously) alive, and still less afraid of death than irrelevance’.