Cassandra Darke

Britain’s favourite graphic novelist returns with her best book yet

Simmonds is a copper-bottomed genius… she is as brilliant a writer as Britain has.

Scrooge is reimagined for 21st-century London in Posy Simmonds’s devilishly good graphic novel, Cassandra Darke — her first in a decade. Cassandra is a marvellous creation… There is too much clever detail in each of the panels to take in everything at first read — but Cassandra is an antiheroine you’ll want to return to.

Simmonds has long been something of a national treasure.

[This] glorious, inky black tale about a mean-spirited old bag of a Chelsea art deal provides more proof of [Posy Simmond’s] genius.

The new graphic novel by cartoonist, writer and national treasure Posy Simmonds... is a page-turner, [but] it’s impossible to gallop through words and pictures that are so richly textured, so sharply observed.

A Christmas crime story that’s bags of fun… Simmonds’ pictorial storytelling is a joy.

Simmonds’ drawings are exquisitely observed, and seamlessly incorporate text messages and online news reports. Her muted palette, with occasional splashes of colour, is absorbing and in the curmudgeonly Cassandra… Simmonds has produced another character that comes living and breathing off the page.

Posy Simmonds's delightful new graphic novel Cassandra Darke, full of wonderfully observed vignettes... [is] treasurable.

[Posy Simmonds] is back with a new anti-heroine… [and] jewel-sharp illustrations.

Posy Simmonds is the mother of the British graphic novel… The end [of Cassandra Darke] is startlingly poignant, and like all good satire it has a quiet reflection on human mortality at its heart.

What a huge treat awaits the readers of this book… [Cassandra Darke] makes one pause in awe to consider the sheet amount of wit, invention, insight, observation, skill, dedication and care that has been distilled into this 94 pages.

In Simmonds's latest nuanced, warm-hearted satire a heartless art dealer makes a discovery that pushes her out of grim rut and into a dark quest.

Guardian, 50 of the Biggest Books to Look Out For in Autumn 2018

Simmonds is a copper-bottomed genius, I have absolutely no idea why she isn't a baroness.

Festive-season glitter and grimness mingle in this handsome Christmas book.

Simmonds offers a sharp portrait of a polarised London.

A page-turning graphic novel… sharp, witty, deliciously observant and so exquisitely drawn it took my breath away. The perfect book for Christmas.

The visual and moral chiaroscuro of the novel, and its unflinching depiction of pathos and loneliness in the most and least privileged of social milieus, make it a strong contender, if not for the meretricious glitter of literary awards, then for the more lasting prize of inclusion in the canon of comic-strip masterpieces.

Posy Simmonds’s…line and way of telling a story are equally deft.

***WINNER OF THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020*** 
 
'Simmonds is a copper-bottomed genius... she is as brilliant a writer as Britain has' Jenny Colgan, Mail Online 
 
Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. 
 
She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body'. 
 
But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body . . . Something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.

Literary Life Revisited

An updated edition of Posy Simmonds’ classic book of cartoons dissecting the literary life

First published in 2003, Literary Life became an instant classic as readers (and writers) delighted in watching Posy Simmonds skewer the pains and pretensions of the writer’s (and reader’s) calling with her inimitable flair for witty satire and sharp social observation. As well as all the cartoons and comic strips from the original edition, The Complete Literary Life includes 40 extra pages of cartoons, including the two series Rick Raker and Dr Derek, in which two very different heroes attempt to right the wrongs afflicting the writing world, one by brute force and skulduggery, the other with a silky bedside manner.

Tamara Drewe

A brilliant new graphic novel inspired by Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, by the author of the widely acclaimed Gemma Bovery.

Posy Simmonds is the laureate of English middle-class muddle, a peerless observer of their romantic confusions, emotional insecurities and professional vicissitudes. She gets to the heart of them more incisively and wittily than any number of her contemporaries... Tamara Drewe offers not only the psychological intricacy of good fiction but also the pictorial subtlety of art

Simmonds manages to be both sympathetic and merciless...she has a novelistic insight and ear for dialogue... If civilisation falls leaving only Tamara Drewe behind, it can be used as a blueprint for a flawless reconstruction of English village life in the mid-2000s, right down to the hoodies in the bus shelter

Posy Simmonds is a true child of Hogarth, her accomplished cartoons a merciless commentary on the way we live now

Simmonds is much more than a cartoonist: she makes us realize that a great cartoonist can be a great artist too

Winner of the Grand Prix 2009 de la Critique Bande Dessinée. 
 
Tamara Drewe has transformed herself. Plastic surgery, a different wardrobe, a smouldering look, have given her confidence and a new and thrilling power to attract, which she uses recklessly. Often just for the fun of it. 
 
People are drawn to Tamara Drewe, male and female. In the remote village where her late mother lived Tamara arrives to clear up the house. Here she becomes an object of lust, of envy, the focus of unrequited love, a seductress. To the village teenagers she is 'plastic-fantastic', a role model. Ultimately, when her hot and indiscriminate glances lead to tragedy, she is seen as a man-eater, a heartless home-wrecker, a slut. 
 
First appearing as a serial in the Guardian, in book form Tamara Drewe has been enlarged, embellished and lovingly improved by the author.

Gemma Bovery

The brilliant graphic novel behind the major new film starring Gemma Aterton (Quantum of Solace), Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Fabrice Luchini (In the House) and Mel Raido (Spooks)

Truly original, witty and well-observed... A work of genius

Wickedly funny... This book is so good that one can hardly bear to reach the end

Hilarious... Gemma Bovery deliciously exploits Posy Simmonds' talent for observing, in words and in pictures, the absurdities of daily life among the aspiring metropolitan middle class at home and abroad

The brilliant graphic novel behind the major new film starring Gemma Aterton (Quantum of Solace), Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Fabrice Luchini (In the House) and Mel Raido (Spooks) 
 
Gemma is the bored, pretty second wife of Charlie Bovery, the reluctant stepmother of his children and the bête-noire of his ex-wife. Gemma's sudden windfall and distaste for London take them across the Channel to Normandy, where the charms of French country living soon wear off. 
 
Is it a coincidence that Gemma Bovery has a name rather like Flaubert's notorious heroine? Is it by chance that, like Madame Bovary, Gemma is bored, adulterous, and a bad credit risk? Is she inevitably doomed? These questions consume Gemma's neighbour, the intellectual baker, Joubert. Denying voyeurism, but nevertheless noting every change in the fit of her jeans, every addition to Gemma's wardrobe, her love-bites and lovers, Joubert, with the help of the heroine's diaries, follows her path towards ruin. Adultery and its consequences. Disappointment and deception. The English in France. Fat and slim. Then and now.

The Young Visiters

A romantic and comic gem from a precocious Victorian nine-year-old that has charmed readers for a century

I adore The Young Visiters, with its delightful voice and exuberant spellings... A blissful book

Funny and touching... one of my favourite comfort reads

If you haven’t read The Young Visiters before you’re in for a treat. Mr Salteena will make you laugh on even the grimmest of days

A total one off, a magic book that has been in the shelves almost all my life and which I go back to with a thrill every decade to so to remind myself why I love it so much

Wonderful… A forgotten gem of a book but so influential in so many ways

One of the most humorous books in literature

[The Young Visiters is] a serious society novel, and takes itself hugely seriously. It ends up being an unwitting parody not only of literature, but of adults as a class of people

[An] extraordinary work… [and an] elegant little edition

A romantic and comic gem from a precocious Victorian nine-year-old that has charmed readers for a century 
 
The Young Visiters is a comic masterpiece that has delighted generations of readers since it was first published in 1919. A classic story of life and love in later Victorian England as seen from the nursery window, it was written in 1890 by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford. 
 
It all starts when Alfred Salteena, who is 'not quite the right side of the blanket', takes young Ethel Montacue to stay with his friend Bernard Clarke... Daisy Ashford has an exquisite eye for matchmaking and manners in English society, and her tale, with its hilarious observation and idiosyncratic spelling, is as irresistible today as it ever was. 
 
This edition of The Young Visiters is illustrated with drawings by Posy Simmonds which are as enchanting and witty as the story. The text has been transcribed from the original manuscript and includes J.M. Barrie's famous preface to the first edition.

Posy Simmonds

For Christmas I would like Mrs Webers’ Omnibus please.

Easily the most charming thing in the Guardian ever.

A satisfyingly fat collection of her old Guardian strips that will make you laugh out loud.

Posy Simmonds's Mrs Weber's Omnibus...collects her Guardian strips of the 70s and 80s about a scruffy, well-meaning Guardian-reading family and their friends... Her cosy in-jokes about middle-class silliness and her sharp political fury over sexual inequality and the divide between rich and poor remain remarkably undated.

Her dry humour and sharp line are combined with merciless observation on the foibles of the middle-classes…a comic genius who has stood the test of time.

In May 1977 Posy Simmonds, an unknown young illustrator, started drawing a weekly comic strip for the Guardian. It began as a silly parody of girls' adventure stories, making satirical comments about contemporary life. The strip soon focused on three 1950s school friends in their later middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenagers; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope and with a young baby. The strip, which was latterly untitled and usually known just as 'Posy', ran until the late 1980s. 
 
Collected here for the first time are the complete strips. Although celebrated for pinpointing the concerns of Guardian readers in the 1980s and their constant struggle to remain true to the ideals of the 1960s, they are in fact remarkably undated. They show one of Britain's favourite cartoonists, celebrated for Literary Life and Tamara Drewe, maturing into genius.

Posy Simmonds

Praise for Mrs Weber's Omnibus

For Christmas I would like Mrs Webers’ Omnibus please.

Easily the most charming thing in the Guardian ever.

A satisfyingly fat collection of her old Guardian strips that will make you laugh out loud.

For Christmas I would like Mrs Webers’ Omnibus please.

Easily the most charming thing in the Guardian ever.

A satisfyingly fat collection of her old Guardian strips that will make you laugh out loud.

For Christmas I would like Mrs Webers’ Omnibus please.

Easily the most charming thing in the Guardian ever.

A satisfyingly fat collection of her old Guardian strips that will make you laugh out loud.

Books by Posy Simmonds

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