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Title: When I Was Otherwise

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Stephen Benatar

Narrator: Helen Lloyd

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-16-15

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

This skillfully wrought examination of character and relationships opens with macabre impact. A bland newspaper report describes the discovery of two dead women - one of them a skeleton - in a North London house. The author teases the reader toward the known, grisly ending by cutting back and forth in time and gradually constructing the complex pattern of emotions and events that define even the most mundane-seeming lives. He plays a similar and equally skillful game with our assessments of the characters. His individual creations are believable, fallible, and ultimately highly engaging individuals.

When I Was Otherwise is a blend of powerful characterization and social satire. It summons the mingled tragedy and humour of old age to powerful effect.

Members Reviews:

"When she was in certain moods, even Scrooge might have found it difficult to hold out long against Daisy."

Sometimes described as "the best British writer that no one has ever heard of," Stephen Benatar, now in his mid-seventies, has been self-publishing and hand-selling his books for the past thirty years, despite his awards and prize nominations. He believes his sales are better than they were when he was published by mainstream publishers. The New York Review of Books has recently republished his 1981 novel, Wish Her Safe at Home, and When I Was Otherwise, Benatar's third novel, written in 1983, has also been republished in England this past spring by Capuchin Books. Benatar has always paid special attention to characters who are dealing with significant emotional stresses, and his novels are filled with psychological insights and feelings the reader understands, even as his mordant wit draws the characters to the edge, allowing the reader to watch them cross the line into darker and darker worlds of their own.

When the novel opens, the police have found two women dead in a house they shared with a male family member in north London, one of the women having been dead for over a year. The three people mentioned are Dan Stormont, a seventy-six-year-old widower; his sister Marsha Poynton, age sixty, a divorcee with two sons who live far away; and Daisy Stormont, their sister-in-law, around whom all the action turns, the widow of Henry Stormont, Dan's brother. Daisy, a lively flirt with great appeal to men, at least in her early days, has kept her age secret for her entire life, and most women are convinced that she is at least fifteen years older than she says she is, which would put her in her eighties at the time of her death.

The novel starts at the end and works its way backward, jumping back and forth among time frames as the background and the entire history of each character are laid bare. Often information about one character is conveyed by another, usually Daisy, from her own point of view, and Benatar is absolutely brilliant at writing dialogue which reveals character, attitudes, and information simultaneously. Daisy has a knack for saying the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment, while seeming to be ingenuous and innocent, and the reader quickly believes that no one could be so insensitive by accident.