Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

From The Paris Review: "Family life is Mortimer’s subject, and in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, she picks it apart with precise, swift, sharp strokes. A mother finds herself locked out of the house she’s rented for her and her family’s holiday; tensions run high between members of a blended family on a Saturday spent at home; a dinner party careens out of the mousy hostess’s control; a husband and wife quarrel while out with their children on a blustery day; a woman in a nursing home is the only witness to the dark drama unfolding in the bed next to her; another is bossed around by her children and husband, all in the name of “rest” on her thirty-ninth birthday; a little girl runs away from boarding school in the middle of the night and home to her beloved father, only to have her faith in him destroyed when he immediately takes her back. “No one knows better how to catalogue in easy narrative the minutiae of domestic life,” wrote a critic in the Sunday Times, “or how to undermine domestic life’s apparent security.” Mortimer has a keen eye for the horror underneath the banality of the everyday, in particular that moment when someone familiar and benign turns monstrous." Lucy Scholes