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    Rebuilding Coventry
    Rebuilding Coventry
    Rebuilding Coventry
    Audiobook6 hours

    Rebuilding Coventry

    Written by Sue Townsend

    Narrated by Kate Lock

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Discover the brilliant, hilarious and unlikely story of a woman's life rebuilt, from the bestselling author of the Adrian Mole series and The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

    'There are two things that you should know about me immediately: the first is that I am beautiful, the second is that yesterday I killed a man. Both things were accidents . . .'

    When Midlands housewife Coventry Dakin kills her next-door neighbour, in a wild attempt to stop him from strangling his wife, she goes on the run.

    Finding herself alone and friendless in London, she tries to lose herself in the city's maze of streets.

    There, she meets a bewildering cast of eccentric characters.

    From Professor Willoughby D'Eresby and his perpetually naked wife Letitia, to Dodo, a care-in the-community inhabitant of Cardboard City, they all contrive to change Coventry in ways she could never have foreseen . . .

    Praise for Sue Townsend:

    'Laugh-out-loud . . . a teeming world of characters whose foibles and misunderstandings provide glorious amusement. Something deeper and darker than comedy' Sunday Times

    'Touching and hilarious. Bursting with witty social commentary as well as humour' WOMAN'S WEEKLY
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateSep 1, 2012
    ISBN9781471211614
    Rebuilding Coventry
    Author

    Sue Townsend

    Sue Townsend was born in Leicester, England, in 1946. Despite not learning to read until the age of eight, leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications, and having three children by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she managed to be very well read. Townsend wrote secretly for twenty years, and after joining a writers’ group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, she won a Thames Television Award for her first play, Womberang, and became a professional playwright and novelist. Following the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, she continued to make the nation laugh and prick its conscience with seven more volumes of Adrian’s diaries, five popular novels—including The Queen and I, Number Ten, and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year—and numerous well-received plays. Townsend passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight, and remains widely regarded as Britain’s favorite comic writer.  

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    Reviews for Rebuilding Coventry

    3/5

    49 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The first words of this, as narrated by Coventry Dakin are "I am beautiful and yesterday I killed a man." She ought to add that she's not exactly the brightest cookie in the box either. Initially this annoyed me, but she does have a kind heart and she gradually grew on me.Coventry seems to have drifted through life, never really making much of an effort, trying to appear small and insignificant. She married Derek, who may well be the most boring man alive, and has two teenage children. As we discover through reading her diary, Coventry has been trying to expand her horizons by attending art classes under an assumed identity. As a result of seeing Gerald Fox trying to strangle his wife, Coventry hits him over the head with an action man and fears that she has murdered him when he drops dead on the carpet. At which point she runs away to London wearing her chimney sweeping clothes and without her handbag. In London she encounters a range of different people, some of whom are rather more odd than others. They all expand her horizon a little, even if the life of the down and out in London felt to be sugar coated in the extreme. Her house mate in Cardboard city was the sister of a disgraced minister and money seemed to not be an object when Dodo didn't want it to be. All somewhat farfetched. It was, in places, sweet, odd, mildly amusing and bizarre all at once. As a pretext for a woman to leave her life, the murder is ridiculous, but if you can look past that, Coventry does grow and find something about herself. Her attitude towards her family is, at times, rather at odds. She describes her husband and children as "drearies" in her diary, but at other times she describes the children in much more glowing terms. As to the marriage, well how Derek ever married her is surely an exploration in itself. It had its passing moments, but didn;t seem, to me, to nest as a coherent whole.
    • 3/5
      Plus a half star, especially for the characterisation. Never too predictable, but never out of character so a very satisfying read. Great sense of humor.
    • 5/5
      This is another laugh-out loud book by Sue Townsend, one of my favourite authors.Coventry Dakin is married to Derek, a boring man whose sole passion is tortoises. They have two half-grown children, John and Mary.One afternoon, Coventry spots her neighbour Gerald Fox attempting to strangle his wife, rushes over to intervene and bangs him on the head with an Action Man. Unfortunately, he falls down dead; in a panic Coventry runs away to London. This book is about her life on the run, alone, penniless and without possessions. She has just been cleaning the chimney so she is covered in soot.At one point, Coventry gets a job as a live-in housekeeper for a professor’s family where the wife, a psychologist, prances around naked all day. Their grownup son is “in a state of ontological insecurity” and has stopped eating. (It’s difficult for the children of psychologists/intellectuals with highly developed brow chakras and no grounding to become psychologically healthy human beings.)The house was in an awful mess since it had never been cleaned. Coventry gets washed, gets a few good meals inside her and is presented with clean clothes; however, when the couple find out she’s wanted for murder, she’s soon chucked out on the streets again.Sue Townsend was a brilliant writer and had a knack for portraying both the speech of the various layers of society and at the same time the various things going on in the outer world. In this book we get a glimpse of what it must be like to be homeless.I highly recommend this excellent, hilarious book to Sue Townsend fans, who haven’t yet read it, and to others who need a good laugh.
    • 3/5
      I hadn't read this for years - possibly not since I was a teenager, because of the Adrian Mole connection. As a 30-something woman I am definitely more its target market. And what is this? It is a dark comedy, but it is also a real Mary-Sue wish fulfilment book - a bored housewife finally hits out at all that is bad, and runs away from her life, and it all mostly works out for her, in a way that is definitely not aiming for realism.
    • 3/5
      I have this book in hard copy with a different cover than Goodreads has in its editions. It's a funny book, wonderful British humor by a British author. The book is not long and has concise writing so the story flows along briskly. Coventry is a married mother of two who gets tired of seeing one of her neighbors, also married with children, abused by her husband. She marches over one day in the midst of such a scene and bops the hubby on the head with a toy doll. He dies. Sure she has killed him, Coventry flees. It's probably easy to prove she didn't kill him, that he was a health explosion waiting to happen, but she has no way of knowing this so she's on the run. This may not sound like humor but it very much is. The book is full of priceless characters.
    • 1/5
      It was a huge dissapointment after reading Adrian Mole's diaries, and not only because I had too great expectations.
    • 5/5
      a departure from adrian mole but no less brillantly written and observed