Leader of the Band
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Fay Weldon mines the fields of sexuality, procreation, and astronomy in her liberating novel about the ongoing quest for self-fulfillment
Sandra Harris—wife, astronomer (known for discovering the planet Athena), television phenomenon, and “professional searcher after truth”—has had an epiphany. She leaves her boring attorney husband and runs off with Mad Jack Stubbs, her trumpet-playing lover, and his groupie entourage, for a tour of Southern France. Pursued by her husband, Mad Jack’s wife, and the paparazzi, Sandra lives entirely for the moment—and great sex. In between, she ponders her past (institutionalized mother, Nazi war criminal father) while trying to ignore the deafening tick of her biological clock. Fay Weldon’s novel is a mirror held up to the face of its reader; an illuminating, reflective tale about sex, ambition, and the love that makes fools of us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In prose as lively and runaway as her heroine, Weldon ( The Hearts and Minds of Men ) weighs love and lust against the impulse to have children. ``Starlady Sandra'' is a popular TV astronomer, famous for discovering the new planet, Athena. At 42, childless, and married to a conventional barrister, Sandra runs off with Mad Jack, trumpet-playing hero of the title, after a single, tempestuous sexual encounter. On a gig in France, Sandra and Jack spend every spare moment in bed--or any approximation--continually ``remaking the universe.'' But over the buzz of sexual gratification, Sandra hears the beat of her biological clock, and reconsiders her origins--her mother is institutionalized for insanity while her father, a Nazi doctor, was tried at Nuremberg and executed for his experiments--and her related decision not to procreate. The novel, to which three short stories written by Sandra are appended, is, like its protagonist, a little scattered, but is vintage Weldon nonetheless--a wickedly delightful explication of those female truths she bares so well.
