Jumping The Queue

Nov 29, 2025 3:02 AM

Author:Mary Wesley

Jumping The Queue

Matilda Poliport, recently widowed and largely estranged from her four adult children, has decided to End It All. She has cleaned her cottage, given away her beloved pet goose and burnt any incriminating letters. Now all that remains for her to do is eat her picnic, take her pills and swim out into the ocean. But her meticulously planned bid for graceful oblivion is interrupted when she foils the suicide bid of another lost soul - Hugh Warner, on the run from the police - and life begins again for them both.

Life, however, is never that simple and awkward questions demand answers. What, for example, was Matilda's husband Tom doing in Paris? Why does Matilda's next door neighbour see UFOs in the skies of Cornwall? And why did Hugh kill his mother?

Reviews

I loved it for its extraordinary combination of despair and wild black humour

—— Julia Blackburn

Great verve and inventiveness

—— Times Literary Supplement

A virtuoso performance of guileful plotting, deft characterisation and malicious wit

—— The Times

Quriky, sexy and deeply fascinating

—— Sheila Hancock

Clever, original and written with brio and eloquence... Bender writes like an angel, with images that strike resonant chords, and her sly humour pervades every page.

—— Publishers Weekly

Incendiary

—— New York Times Book Review

This mesmerizing novel places a mathematical mind, poet's imagination, and voodoo queen's superstition in an athlete's body and sets to work, in a town stark as a blackboard, on the problem of Death. Pitting axes against angst, kids against cancer, soap against sex, wax numbers against depression, and love against the certainty of the beloved's doom, Aimee Bender nevertheless arrives--with wit, grace, and proof (that math is funny)--at compassion

—— David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and River Teeth

Aimee Bender writes in a skillfully minimal way, everything very tight and poignant and sharp and often burning, quick to get to things and out of them, but still providing us with significant characters of emotional depth

—— Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and 30: Pieces of a Novel

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