Daddy's Gone A-Hunting — Penelope Mortimer

A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion -- “her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel” (Rachel Cooke, The Observer)

Bourgeois housewife Ruth Whiting is “paralysed by triviality,” measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge parties -- routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. Then Angela accidentally falls pregnant, and Ruth must keep her own past from repeating itself.

First published in 1958, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with its “feminine rage” (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a mother and daughter who must join forces in a man's world.