Waiting for a Party

Claire Meadows, 92, reminiscences about her life, her failed ambition to become a concert pianist, her missed opportunity to have a child, her friends and lovers, mostly dead, she is troubled by the part she played, consciously and deliberately, in the death of her husband.

Claire Meadows is ninety-two, a retired piano teacher. She’s baked a pistachio cake, as she has for seventy years, and is waiting to be collected for the 102nd birthday party of her old friend Martin, a detective novelist. As she waits, her thoughts meander through a lifetime of memories – marriage, widowhood, friendship, longing, and a sexual awakening that came shockingly late.

With humour, ambiguity, and sharp insight, Claire reconsiders the man she married, the life she lived, and the strange, hard-won freedom that followed. What really happened the night her husband died? Did she remake her life, or simply reframe it? And is desire ever really behind us?

By turns tender, frank, and subversively funny, Waiting for a Party is a quietly radical portrait of an older woman who refuses to disappear.

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