I Believe in Angels - Softcover

Fiona Cooper is the author of Rotary Spokes, Heartbreak on the High Sierra and Not the Swiss Family Robinson. She was born in 1955 and now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

In this fitting companion to her wry and witty novels, Cooper treats us to 17 stories full of irony, compassion, pathos, and humor. Her centerpiece is "Ilsa's War," in which an elderly Jewish woman shares her story with a writer house-sitting in a tiny English village. Her funniest story concerns an afternoon tea given by a lesbian and her "poofter" (gay male) roommate for her co-worker at a London "buti" preschool and the woman's Dennis-the-Menace grandson; the totally charmed grandmum leaves with the little terror remodeled into a diminutive Boy George. Other stories, too, involve interplay between children and the elderly. A grandmother assigns the guardians in "I Believe in Angels"; an elderly woman who claims "the five senses seduced us into life" recounts her past incarnations in "Time after Time"; and grandmother and granddaughter face the defeat represented by an oil slick on their beloved beach in "Early One Morning." Cooper's characters quest for knowledge and find that everything has a price. Marie Kuda