Born 90 years ago, the much-loved Dame was shortlisted five times for the Booker Prize - the most that any author has been shortlisted without actually winning
The Dressmaker
Written by Beryl Bainbridge
- Shortlisted
- The Booker Prize 1973
- Published by Duckworth
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The mundane and the macabre collide in Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly comic tale about the shockingly unexpected consequences of a young girl’s heartbreak
Wartime Liverpool is a place of ration books and jobs in munitions factories. Seventeen-year-old Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naïve and withdrawn. When she meets Ira, an American soldier, at a neighbour’s party, she falls in love almost as much with the idea of life as a GI bride as with the man himself. But Nellie and Margo are not nearly so blind…
Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine
More about Beryl Bainbridge Other nominated books by Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge’s masterly evocation of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain’s greatest Man of Letters, in all his wit and glory
Beryl Bainbridge explores the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures - and hidden secrets - of her enigmatic central character
Beryl Bainbridge’s fictional history chronicles the fate of the privileged passengers of the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage
A darkly comic novel about class, the long shadow of war, and unrequited first love
Surprises abound in Beryl Bainbridge’s unsettling comic novel, praised by fellow author Graham Greene as both ‘outrageously funny and horrifying’
