Works by
Patricia Duncker
(Writer)
[June 29, 1951 - ]

Edited (with Janet Thomas)

• Safe World Gone: Contemporary Stories by Women from Wales (2007, Amazon UK)

• Mirror Mirror (2004, Amazon UK )
  By turns spooky, sexy and touching, Mirror Mirror is a collection of short stories on the theme of" the Other Woman" that builds on the success of previous collections of Welsh women's fiction,  Catwomen from Hell, Power, and The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers. Including a range of contemporary, historical, sci-fi, traditional and experimental fiction, this collection shows how women can feel separate in various areas of their lives - as lovers, daughters, friends, as Welsh or English, or even within themselves!

• The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers ( 2002, Amazon UK, Amazon US )

Essays

• Writing on the Wall   (2003, Amazon UK,  Amazon US)
  A study in critical readership, this wide-ranging collection of essays challenges accepted theories on everything from classics such as  Charlotte Brontë's Villette to more contemporary works like Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man. Explored are ideas of sexual subversion and queer politics. Literature's sacred cows are reevaluated, and new ways to explore both reading and writing are offered.

Fiction

• Miss Webster and Cherif   (2006, Amazon UK, Amazon US)

• Seven Tales of Sex and Death   (2003, Amazon UK, Amazon US)

• The Deadly Space Between (2002, Amazon UK,  Amazon US)
  A solitary boy in a family of independent, unconventional women, Toby Hawk lives in a small, closed world that consists of school and surfing the Internet. His mother, Isobel, a painter on the brink of commercial success, is only fifteen years his senior and the two share an unusually intimate bond. But everything changes when Isobel takes up with Roehm, a fascinating and enigmatic scientist. As he begins his slow dance of courtship and seduction, alienating mother from son, their world becomes unstable and duplicitous. Toby turns to the Web for clues about his mother’s hauntingly irresistible, predatory lover -- and the answers he finds transform his life.
  
  An eerie psychological ghost story with echoes of Faust, Freud, and Frankenstein, The Deadly Space Between is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passions -- a rich and dark exploration of sexual ambiguity and longing.

• James Miranda Barry (1999, Amazon UK, Amazon US )

• The Doctor (1999, Amazon UK, The Doctor)
  At the turn of the 19th century in England, a young, beautiful Mary Ann Bulkeley gives birth to a redheaded baby girl of uncertain paternity. Before the sensitive tomboy turns ten, the family determines she should be raised and schooled as a boy.
  
  So begins The Doctor, a provocative, illuminating novel based on a true story about a brilliant female physician who is compelled to live as a man under the name James Miranda Barry. Patricia Duncker, the author of Hallucinating Foucault, traces Barry's incredible life over the course of five decades and across three continents, from his cross-dressing child genius days to medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland; from his glorious career as a military surgeon to his adventures as a celebrated duelist and social figure known throughout the world.
  
  During his travels around the Empire, Barry challenged the antiquated medical beliefs of the time, fought off outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, and dueled reluctantly over a young woman's honor. The Doctor tells Barry's story for the first time, and it is filled with an extraordinary and vivid collection of characters. There's the Venezuelan revolutionary general with an enormous moustache and a poetry addiction. The shabbily eccentric English aristocrat and his serpent look-alike sister. And then there's Alice Jones, the ruthless and gorgeous kitchenmaid--all legs, black curls and ambition--who is the object of Barry's enduring affection.

• Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees (1997, Amazon UK, Amazon US)
  From the author of the critically acclaimed Hallucinating Foucault comes this stunning collection of stories united by the themes of pleasure, passion, jealousy, and revenge. Patricia Duncker creates worlds where the apparently innocent are not harmless and people never turn out to be exactly what they seem.
  
  In "The Arrival Matters" -- the extra-ordinary novella that crowns the collection -- the characters play out the sinister and atmospheric end game of a mysterious and supernatural history of love. Elsewhere, a jealous husband pursues his adulterous wife through the streets of Paris, a forbidden book subverts an authoritarian state, a TV crew gets considerably more than it bargained for, and a lesbian community in uproar is described with wry humor.
  
  Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees is a remarkable encore in the career of this daring and provocative writer.

• Hallucinating Foucault (1996, Amazon UK,  Amazon US) -- Winner 1996 McKitterick Prize

Non-fiction

• Sisters and Strangers: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction (1991, Amazon UK, Amazon US)