Another Part of the Wood

A Novel

Social dysfunction meets dangerous perversion in this black comedy about two misfit families camping in the Welsh woods.

George McFarley, a six-foot-eight hulk of a man obsessed with the Holocaust, and his assistant, Balfour, an unbearably shy stutterer, are the unconventional hosts of a weekend camping retreat in Wales. Their guests include Joseph, a divorced college administrator from London; Dotty, his pretty but resentful girlfriend; Roland, his young son; and Kidney, his overweight and emotionally disturbed apprentice. Also staying on for the weekend are dysfunctional couple, Lionel and May—and a Welsh groundskeeper with a creepy fondness for cattle . . . and little girls.
 
Dotty has brought along the board game Monopoly, which she cannot live without, and which will serve as a microcosm for the roles and dramas played out by this motley crew. While the adults are caught up in petty bickering, power struggles, love triangles, and other bourgeois scandals, tragedy will befall one of the children and turn the bucolic setting into a twisted nightmare.
 
With award-winning author Beryl Bainbridge’s signature dark humor and sophisticated irony, Another Part of the Wood takes to task 1960s British cultural mores. As the plot twists and characters remove their masks, Bainbridge reveals the absurdity and danger of what is commonly considered “normal.”