The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

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are dubiously navigated by Townsend in the form of questionable plot devices and two-dimensional characters. The book was billed as being about a woman who'd had enough, and finally given up the struggle - and that idea interested me.

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year is a funny and touching novel about what happens when someone stops being the person everyone wants them to be.This is much to the consternation of Eva's husband who is busy sowing his wild oats in the garden shed. A tour de force by a comic genius and if it isn't the best book published this year, I'll eat my bookshelf. She doesn't eat or drink unless someone brings it to her bed and she has to devise a plan just to go to the loo as Eva's feet can't touch the floor.

The twins, Brian Junior and Brianne, are fleetingly funny in their deadpan hedonism but quickly grate.Who will keep remote tabs on their twins, mathematical prodigies whose asocial tendencies mean that they are unlikely to slip easily into the swim of college life? Several of her books have been adapted for the stage, including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾: The Play (1985) and The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994), which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company at the Vaudeville Theatre and toured Australia. To be frank, the style can be pedestrian at times but the content is candid, sensitive and empathetic, and displays an enormous zest for life. To unlock the heavy outer door and to walk into the hushed interior, with the morning light spilling from the high windows on to the waiting books, gave her such pleasure that she would have worked for nothing.

The woman in the bed inspired different reactions from different readers, like a Rorschach test of reality. I would recommend reading 'I still dream about you' by Fannie Flagg, which is at least a better attempt at showing an older woman, struggling with the cruelty of the world.

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year’ does however raise and allude to more serious points – Eva who doesn’t have a particularly difficult, challenging or stressful life – something which is readily acknowledged by her and yet….