Synopsis
Vivid, compelling and highly charged, My House is Falling Down is the gripping story of a woman stretching love to its limits.
For Lucy, marriage to Mark provided an anchor after several years of drifting casually across countries, into jobs and out of relationships. Now forty-two, her anchor is working loose. Bewildered by the demands of motherhood and dissatisfied by her work, she has also grown resentful of her husband: Mark has serious difficulties of his own and whilst harsh self-reliance has kept him sane, it has alienated his wife.
When Lucy falls in love with Angus, a pianist in his sixties, her shock is extreme. Adamant that she will not deceive her husband, she instead asks his advice. Mark’s reaction, however, is startlingly unorthodox, leaving Lucy to steer an impossible course between duty and desire, adventure and security. As her marriage falters and Angus presses for commitment, she is forced to choose between family and self, with profound consequences for everyone.
Infused with her trademark precision, clarity and dark humour, My House is Falling Down is a fearless exploration of what infidelity means when no one is lying, and how brutal honesty may yet prove the biggest taboo in our relationships.
F I C T I O N
Mary Loudon
My House Is Falling Down
P I C A D O R
Reviews
“A truthful, exciting, agonising adult love triangle. An emotional labyrinth, with monsters, great risks – and survival.”
— Laline Paull, author of The Bees
“A novel of great tenderness and intelligence…a grown up love tangle with interesting, grown up men and women.”
— Andrew Miller, author of Pure
“What a lucid, subtle and beautiful writer she is, with a gift for slicing through to the complexities of a relationship or a situation. Reading anything by Mary Loudon is to peer through the bell jar to the truths captured inside it.”
— Elizabeth Buchan, author of The Good Wife
“Nothing I say could match the emotional lure and its sustaining that is here. First person love – real, lived – a tense, irresistible read.”
— Jon Snow, Channel 4 News anchor
“Loudon is a writer of elegance and high intelligence.”
— Times
“Mary Loudon’s forte is exploring complex emotional and ethical issues with great delicacy and insight.”
— Daily Telegraph
“Wow. Intense and haunting and the writing is exquisite.”
— Observer
Synopsis
“On the twenty-seventh of January 2001, while I was skiing fast down a mountain in France, my sister, Catherine, was dying slowly in England; in a hospital I didn’t know she had been admitted to, from a cancer I didn’t know she had, under an identity I had no idea existed.”
Relative Stranger is the story of Mary Loudon’s search for her dead sister: her quest to find out where she’d lived, and how; her desire to better understand her, and her attempts to piece together the fragments of a life blighted by severe mental illness. Heart-breaking, compelling and deeply moving, Relative Stranger examines our assumptions about familial responsibility and the value of a human life, interrogating everything we believe about what it means to love, lose, live, die and, above all, to belong.
N O N - F I C T I O N
Mary Loudon
Relative Stranger:
A Sister’s Life After Death
C A N O N G A T E
Reviews
“Mary Loudon writes with great flair, clarity, imaginative intensity, and extraordinary confidence and style. Honest and unvarnished and without mawkishness of any kind; convincing, gripping and moving.”
— Jonathan Dimbleby
“Outstanding.... Vivid, true and moving.”
— Times
“She is remarkable for being so personal and so wrenchingly honest without self-indulgence.”
— James Naughtie, BBC Radio 4
“An absolute beacon of excellence... the clearest, most insightful and honest book I have read.”
— Mslexia
“Head and shoulders above the rest of the memoir genre … Honest, unsentimental, exquisitely written.”
— Eve
“Remarkable, affecting and a comfort, too. Mary Loudon sees through the dark of insanity to the light of understanding.”
— Fay Weldon
“Relative Stranger is not “just” about mental sickness, but about family relationships, expectations, and the different ways we all find to survive the perilous journey of life.”
— Daily Mail
Synopsis
Secrets & Lives: Middle England Revealed is a collection of 46 utterly compelling true stories, taken from several years of conversations with people from the English market town where the author grew up.
The result is a portrait of the English as has never been painted before. The England Mary Loudon exposes is one of extremes and opposites. It emerges as a place, and a disposition, as bleak for some as it is privileged for others; as loathed as much as it is loved; as nostalgic as it is progressive. Potent, moving and unexpectedly shocking, Secrets & Lives will shatter the myth of small-town cosiness and rural bliss while reinforcing a universal human desire for love, security and community identity.
Hairdressing, hunting, selling shoes, doing drugs, Morris dancing, standing for Mayor, getting divorced, contemplating suicide, forgiving a war crime, turning your son into the police, losing your daughter, being in a racial minority; being visible or being invisible… Secrets & Lives is a unique, intimate portrait of other people’s lives, and how they may speak of our own.
N O N - F I C T I O N
Mary Loudon
Secrets & Lives:
Middle England Revealed
P A N M A C M I L L A N
Reviews
“A Canterbury Tales for our times … Loudon, who has the gift of being able to listen and empathise, has produced a book that should be required reading for our political leaders.”
— Times
“Mary Loudon has a precious gift. She can listen. And so, people tell her things they might otherwise lock inside their hearts… She follows in the footsteps of Tony Parker and Studs Terkel. Those men, like her, had ears as sharp as scalpels. At the end of her stories, the cliches have collapsed. A remarkable, compulsively readable portrait.”
— Independent
“Mary Loudon’s deceptively quiet approach peels away the layers to show that there is no such thing as an ordinary life.”
— Joanna Trollope
“Loudon’s sharp, poignant, tragic or comic short stories offer a powerful sense of the sheer wonder and private eccentricity of human life. Some are remarkably intense, with Dostoyevskian power.”
— Sunday Times
“Secrets and Lives gives you a strength I can’t really explain. It’s about the completely hidden heroism, guts and bravery of so many people, and through it we are reminded that everyone is vulnerable and that they all have different ways of dealing with it.”
— Spectator
“Mary Loudon reveals the intimacies and indiscretions of life in a way seldom, if ever, associated with the sedately average English heart.”
— Evening Standard
“She addresses directly our curiosity about how others live their lives, what they think, how they see themselves, how they see the world… We begin to understand the violent impulses of rage or love.”
— Catholic Herald
Synopsis
In Revelations: The Clergy Questioned, twelve Church of England clergy – from curates to Archbishops – tell their personal stories, simultaneously revealing truths and doubts about themselves, each other, and the complex world of the church within which they operate.
In these extraordinarily intimate portraits, gathered together as the twentieth century ended, Mary Loudon (who is herself an agnostic) explores the breadth of views and range of disagreements upheld by the clergymen and women whose ministries in the Anglican Church are increasingly challenged and compromised, as the world changes fast, furiously, and unpredictably.
With so many contemporary challenges to the traditional values of the Church of England, how is its clergy coping? What hopes, visions and beliefs do the men and women who have sworn allegiance not just to a Christian God, but to a Leviathan-like institution that has lost its power, hold now?
N O N - F I C T I O N
Mary Loudon
Revelations: The Clergy Questioned
H A M I S H H A M I L T O N / P E N G U I N
Reviews
“Absolutely fascinating.”
— Times
“Mary Loudon has done it again. Her first book was a tribute to her skill at getting people who seldom talk about themselves to reveal their inner lives. This second book is equally enthralling…”
— Independent on Sunday
“Loudon enables her subjects to speak about their personal struggle for ultimate meaning with a compelling and frequently moving frankness. [Their] willingness to bare their souls and reveal their vulnerability is all the more impressive since the clergy are understandably wary … and is a measure of Loudon’s success.”
— Sunday Times
“Listen to the voices, by turns hilarious, angry, sorrow-filled and tranquil, which ring so authentically and personally through Loudon’s beautifully crafted writing. This is an enthralling book.”
— Daily Telegraph
“Absorbing, intimate, well-crafted and interesting.”
— New Statesman
“A remarkable collection. It is captivating stuff.”
— Yorkshire Post
“Engrossing reading.”
— Literary Review
Synopsis
In Unveiled: Nuns Talking, ten nuns from vastly diverse backgrounds and religious orders speak openly about themselves and their choices in these intensely moving, frank and uninhibited life stories.
The stories they have to tell are always surprising, often bizarre and sometimes deeply distressing. Three of the nuns escaped wars: while one feels her life is a form of reparation, another - a former Jew who fled the Nazis on the kindertransport – becomes a Christian in a complex attempt both to hide and to live more openly. While some of them live lives of strict enclosure, others had (and some still have) jobs: among them is an AIDS counsellor, a journalist, a silversmith and a consultant anaesthetist.
Sharp, probing, and sympathetic, this global bestseller challenges, dismantles and reinvigorates almost everything most people believe about nuns, and the religious life.
N O N - F I C T I O N
Mary Loudon
Unveiled: Nuns Talking
C H A T T O & W I N D U S / V I N T A G E
Reviews
“Unveiled will shatter the common assumption that nuns are frustrated inadequate human beings.”
— New Statesman
“A blast of fresh air [which] addresses the big issues facing women in religion – and therefore religion as a whole – with intelligence and integrity.”
— Sydney Sun-Herald
“The public image of nuns is saintly, saccharine or smutty. The truth is far less patronising, far more daunting. What they are is brave; what they display is integrity.”
— Independent
“I have laughed and cried, been irritated and driven to anger but above all, I have been astonished at the strong emotions and intellectual strengths revealed… Packs an emotional punch as striking as some psychological novels.”
— Home and Family
“Mary Loudon’s unobtrusive tact and rare capacity for empathy have made it possible for her subjects to reveal themselves fearlessly.”
— Independent on Sunday
“Her gentle but expert manner… achieves the almost impossible balance of disclosure without betrayal.”
— Daily Telegraph
“Zoom-lens portrayals which dispel the mysteries.”
— Sydney Morning Herald
“Absorbing, inspiring and down-to-earth.”
— Observer (Books of The Year)