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Four Stories (Hardback)

Alan Bennett

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Hardback Published: 17/04/2014

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Synopsis Author

The Laying on of Hands, the painfully observant account of a memorial service for a masseur to the famous. The Clothes They Stood Up In, the comic tale of an elderly couple's trials after their flat is stripped completely bare. Father! Father! Burning Bright, the savage satire on the family of a dying man who rules over them from his hospital bed. The Lady in the Van, the true story of the eccentric old woman who is invited to live in a homeowner's front garden. She stays there, in her van, for fifteen years. The home is Alan Bennett's. It became a West End hit, starring Maggie Smith. Like everything Bennett does, these stories are playful, witty and painfully observant of ordinary people's foibles. They all have brilliant twists, are immensely entertaining and highly moral. And all are modern classics.

Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781781253793

Alan Bennett

Born in 1934, the son of a Leeds butcher, Alan Bennett gained a scholarship to Oxford and prepared himself for a career as a medieval historian. However, Bennett soon discovered that he had thespian tendencies and became increasingly active in local stage productions and revues. Bennett achieved fame and notoriety in 1960 when he appeared in Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller. Throughout the 1960s Bennett continued to write for (and occasionally appear in) satirical sketch-based shows, but his real passion was drama and during the 1970s he made a name for himself as a playwright.

Bennett's wistful, melancholy style and fine ear for the nuances of Northern, working-class speech have transformed him from an enfant terrible into a national treasure ( a sobriquet he detests) and when he published his diaries Writing Home in the mid-nineties, it topped the bestseller lists. He followed up with Untold Stories in 2005, which proved equally popular, and in autumn 2006, a successful adaptation of his play, The History Boys, was released as a film. Bennett's work adapts exceptionally well to audio and he is perhaps the single most successful British writer and performer in that format.

Book and writing awards

Hawthornden Prize 1989 (Talking Heads), British Book Award, Book of the Year 1995 (Writing Home), J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography 2006 (Untold Stories), Bodley Medal 2008.