Cassandra at the Wedding

'Knowing and wise . . . A dark comedy about marriage.' -- Guardian 'I am not, at heart, a jumper. I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd attend my sister's wedding.' Cassandra Edwards is driving home to her family's Californian ranch to attend the wedding of her beloved identical twin, Judith. A graduate student at Berkeley, Cassandra is gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable - and hell-bent on making sure her sister's wedding doesn't go ahead. Armed with a clutch bag full of pills and an unquenchable thirst for brandy, Cassandra arrives determined to make Judith see sense. But over the course of the next couple of days Cassandra unravels. A classic of twentieth-century American literature, Cassandra at the Wedding is a stylish, witty and insightful novel about love, loyalty and coming to terms with the only life you have. 'Modern readers will relish the pin-sharp portrait of a tiny part of society, as if picked out in Californian sunlight. Really good writing like this doesn't age.' -- Guardian 'Witty and assured. Her tone is dark but jaunty, the writing off-handedly smart.' -- London Review of Books 'Baker's ear for dialogue is acute, her prose immaculate... this is a novel of exceptional quality.' -- TLS 'The mastery of technique here is just about absolute.' -- New York Times 'I - whose usual bed time is ten o'clock - stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding - dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist.' -- Carson McCullers

Dorothy Baker (1907-1968) was born in Montana and grew up in California. Her first novel, Young Man with a Horn (1938), based on the life of the jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, won a Houghton Mifflin Literature Fellowship and was made into a 1950 film starring Lauren Bacall, Doris Day and Kirk Douglas. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942, Baker wrote three other novels: Trio (1943), Our Gifted Son (1948) and Cassandra at the Wedding (1962).