Having published ten novels in thirteen years, primarily to "tell her story," Beryl Bainbridge has good reason to view her literary career with satisfaction. An unassuming and deferential person, Bainbridge is a spartan writer whose wit, humor, and originality have won her a loyal, ever-growing audience in England and abroad. Bainbridge initially achieved recognition as a writer of macabre thrillers. More recently, however, her "little" novels have received more serious critical attention for their economical, elegant craft and for their oddly angled, shockingly funny portraits of harried, lower-middle-class people caught in a world that, according to one of them, is "menacing and full of alarms."

On 21 November 1933, in Liverpool, England, Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was born to Winifred Baines and Richard Bainbridge. When she was six months old, she moved with her parents and six-year-old brother to a small, semidetached house in Thornby, on the seacoast about twelve miles...