The Shrapnel Academy

A weekend in the country erupts into a free-for-all of mutiny, sex, and murder
On the anniversary of the Eve of the Battle of Waterloo, an assortment of unusual dinner guests gather at a remote country house to pay homage to Henry Shrapnel, inventor of the exploding cannonball. But all is not peaceful at the Shrapnel Academy: The downstairs servants, a group of third-world refugees led by a South African butler, are plotting to overthrow their upstairs oppressors. When a blizzard hits the countryside and traps everyone indoors, the rebellion erupts into bloody warfare throughout the Academy, “a shrine to the ethos of military excellence.” With characters that include a domineering female sergeant, a war-mongering general, a brain-damaged spy, and an idiot-savant arms dealer, Fay Weldon gives us a country house novel replete with sexual atrocity and class warfare. No one will emerge unscathed in this stinging tale of modern-day barbarians, where the deadliest weapons are the ever-raging battles between the haves and the have-nots.
“An explosive novel, to English drawing room comedy what the Hindenburg was to zeppelin flight . . . a human sampler of the old Empire in accelerated decline.” —Los Angeles Times                                                   “Weldon’s best novels don’t let either women or men off the hook . . . If there is a heroine in her novel it is probably the abrasive but endearingly sane feminist, Mew . . . her most admirable character is the biggest warmonger of them all, the urbane, sexy and distinguished General Makeshift.” —The New York Times “This time Weldon focuses her lethal spray of darkly comic assessments of the quirky-to-downright nasty in human relationships, on mankind’s gloriously galumphing determination to eradicate itself . . . The inevitable Big Bang is truly impressive. An acidulously funny yet stinging commentary on our institutionalized homicidal lunacies, along with Weldon’s casual reminder that the Gentle Reader (that’s us) ‘is as ferocious as anyone else.’ Hilarity with a wallop.” —Kirkus Reviews
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire. Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil, the film adaption of her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.