TY - BOOK AU - Weldon,Fay TI - Before the war T2 - Spoils of war SN - 9781784082062 U1 - 823.92 23 PY - 2016/// CY - London PB - Head of Zeus KW - Aristocracy KW - Great Britain KW - Fiction KW - Interpersonal relations KW - Young women KW - Nineteen twenties KW - Single women KW - Companionate marriage KW - Man-woman relationships KW - Aristocracy (Social class) KW - England KW - London (England) KW - History KW - 20th century KW - Historical fiction KW - lcgft N2 - Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is twenty-four, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - almost worse in those times - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as 'the giantess'. Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic gentleman publisher to marry her. What he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another's child, and will die in childbirth in just a few months... Fay Weldon, with one eye on the present and one on the past, offers Vivien's fate to the reader, along with that of London between the wars. This is a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers and aristocrats clinging onto the past. Inventive, warm, playful and full of Weldon's trademark ironic edge, this is a spellbinding historical novel from one of the best novelists of our time ER -