Showing results for "Queen" in Satire

For the past 13 years, as England became an increasingly unhappy and fearful place, Prince Charles has been living quietly on a bleak council estate with his wife and love of his life, Camilla. He enjoys gardening and poultry keeping while Camilla spends her days doing as little as possible. But life is about to change.

The queen bee of the fictional village of Riseholme, Mrs. Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas is a snobbish yet oddly charming woman who prides herself on being the cultural and intellectual leader of her community. She dabbles in art, plants Shakespeare-themed flower arrangements in her garden and uses fake Italian phrases to maintain her social standing. Trouble brews when some new arrivals to town – including the glamorous opera singer Olga Bracely and the eccentric spiritualist Daisy Quantock – begin to challenge Lucia’s hold over Riseholme.

“A delight….[A] funny and warmhearted exploration of the sacred and the profane.” —Washington Post “Reading The Next Queen of Heaven is like hanging on to the back of an out-of-control carnival ride—terrifying, thrilling, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.” —Ann Patchett New York...

When a Republican party wins the general election, they strip the royal family of everything and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. Is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance, or deep down are they really just like everyone else?

This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the thin, awkward, myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle’s condescension in his aunt’s bed.