The Habit of Widowhood - Hardcover

A new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed Robert Barnard that will both fascinate and chill.

A young couple arrive on their Greek honeymoon island paradise to find the snake already on the quay. A girl, kept innocent of the ways of the world by her religious family, has her future secured by marriage to an elderly widower. A soldier, home from the Somme makes dangerously free of the bedrooms of working-class Armley. A butcher does his sums and realises that his business won't stand the cost of a divorce settlement, and that he'll have to go for something more final.

Sometimes in Robert Barnard's short stories the setting is everyday, and that it is the family next door who find murder invading their prosaic existences. At other times more august figures are involved. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, initiates the fashion for royal confessionals by penning an account of a gambling scandal at his august Mama's Balmoral. And Jane Eyre finds that marriage to Mr Rochester is enough to drive any woman mad.

'The Habit of Widowhood' is Robert Barnard's first story collection for seven years, and the excellence and intricacy of his prose and plotting shows why the 'New York Times' suggested he 'could teach a spider a trick or two about spinning webs'.

PRAISE FOR ROBERT BARNARD:

'The Bad Samaritan'

"Robert Barnard's talent is fascinatingly on show in 'The Bad Samaritan."'
John Coleman, 'Sunday Times'

"Barnard is a dab hand with his peppermint and prayer-book bitchery".
Philip Oakes, 'Literary Review'

'The Masters of the House'

"Barnard never disappoints. The psychological suspense is chilling".
Marcel Berlins, 'The Times'

"Robert Barnard retails this finely suspenseful tale, incorporating the Hitchcockian awkwardness of disposing of a body, with spellbinding, step-by-step matter of factness'.
John Coleman, 'Sunday Times'

"Barnard at the very top of his form in an inner-city version of Babes in the Wood".
Gerald Kaufman, 'Scotsman'