{ "item_title" : "In the Driver's Seat", "item_author" : [" Helen Simpson "], "item_description" : "A dark, dazzling, surprisingly funny new collection of stories (Masterly --Adam Mars Jones, The Observer; A virtuoso performance --Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) about single women and wives in various phases of midlife--anxious mothers, besotted mothers, beset mothers--in a (futile) search for security and consolation. Helen Simpson's stories are short but by no means small. One story takes the Iraq war as its subject; another describes a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer; in another, a simple tale of home maintenance--a woman in a conversation with the carpenter replacing her door after a break-in--becomes a deftly sketched study of grief. In still another, Simpson manages the seemingly impossible--producing laughter at terminal illness and untimely death (this might be the first story in which the amputation of a limb provides a happy ending). And finally, the story entitled Constitutional--a pun on one of the word's meanings: a walk taken for the benefit of one's health--deals with memory, family, Alzheimer's, oak trees, pregnancy for the over-forties, stolen photographs, and crossword puzzles. Helen Simpson's stories move and disturb us as they light up the human gift for making the best of it--whatever it is.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/30/727/756/0307277569_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "13.95", "online_price" : "13.95", "our_price" : "13.95", "club_price" : "13.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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