Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge

Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge is an extraordinary tragicomic portrayal of suburban life and one of the classic American novels of the twentieth century.

Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren''t growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty.

The companion novel Mr Bridge, telling the story from the other side of the marriage, is also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

''A perfect novel ... Its tone - knowing, droll, plaintive, shuttling rapidly between pain and hilarity - elevates it to its own kind of specialness ... One of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up'' Meg Wulitzer, The New York Times

''Intimate ... affecting ... a very funny book'' Joshua Ferris