The Lady in the Van and Three Stories

This volume pairs a memoir with three novellas. The title piece follows Miss Mary Shepherd, an elderly woman who lives for years in a van parked in the writer's Camden driveway, and the daily bargaining over sanitation, visitors, and her invented past. The stories then turn to a memorial service for a society masseur, a couple who come home to find their flat emptied of every possession, and a son keeping watch beside a dying father in a hospital ward. The book is comic and documentary prose about neighbours, death, and property, not a play text and not a single continuous novel.

4 full page illustrations. Pictorial green cloth boards with blocked image and black lettering to spine. Dark green slipcase.