You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL 2019 marked the centenary of Stanley Middleton's birth. Holiday, winner of the 1974 Booker Prize, remains the most celebrated and popular novel from 'the Chekhov of suburbia'. Edwin Fisher has fled to a seaside resort of his childhood past to try to come to terms with the death of his baby son and the collapse of his marriage to Meg. On this strange and lonely holiday, as he seeks to understand what went wrong, Edwin must find somea way to think about what he has been and decide upon where he can go next. ______________________________________ 'At first glance, or even at second, Stanley Middleton's world is easily recognizable... The excellence of art, for Middleton, is an exact vision of real things as they are. And because he is himself so exact an observer, his world at third glance can seem strange and disturbing or newly and brilliantly lit with colour.' A.S. Byatt 'We need Stanley Middleton to remind us what the novel is about. Holiday is vintage Middleton... One has to look at nineteenth-century writing for comparable storytelling.' Sunday Times
From the Booker-Prize-winning author of Holiday. Rejacketed and reissued by Windmill to mark the 40th anniversary of Middleton's Booker Prize win. One winter evening Alistair Murray opens his door to Eleanor Franks, a woman he has not seen for decades. A man apparently content with his life, even his retirement and bereavement have come as part of the natural order of things. But just when he thinks he must get used to the slow, lonely decline into old age, Eleanor arrives to make him call into question everything he has taken for granted. - "Middleton wrote books you remember decades on... He wrote a calm, whispering prose, full of unspoken suggestion between ordinary acts of daily living." --Jenny Diski - "He shows us the way we age and die now, with real and graceful disstinction." --Sunday Times
The Booker Prize-winning author Stanley Middleton's last novel
From the entry of Shakespeare's birth in the Stratford church register to a Norwegian production of Macbeth in which the hero was represented by a tomato, this enthralling and splendidly illustrated book tells the story of Shakespeare's life, his writings, and his afterlife. Drawing on a lifetime's experience of studying, teaching, editing, and writing about Shakespeare, Stanley Wells combines scholarly authority with authorial flair in a book that will appeal equally to the specialist and the untutored enthusiast. Chapters on Shakespeare's life in Stratford and in London offer a fresh view of the development of the writer's career and personality. At the core of the book lies a magisterial ...
Noel's sister, Ethel, is dying, and for the first time since childhood, he spends a week in her company. As she drifts in and out of consciousness, he discovers more about her past, her fight for women's rights in education, and in the process reasses his own life. Buried in this past is a secret infatuation for a man who reappears in Ethel's story, and that of her daughter, in a most unexpected way.
'WITH NEARLY FORTY NOVELS UNDER HIS BELT, STANLEY MIDDLETON IS A SPECIES OF ALAN AYCKBOURN. . . HE DEALS WITH THE MARRIED MIDDLE CLASS. . AND FINDS POIGNANT TRUTHS AMID THEIR PREOCCUPATIONS. ' TIME OUT Sam Martin feels himself to be lucky. He lives in rich retirement and in good health despite his old age, busying himself with painting, walking and with the affairs of others he observes from his Norfolk bungalow. Confronted by a necessary and approaching end, the strong purpose of his earlier life seems to have diminished; but there are still surprises to be had, especially in a constricted life, as Sam, and those around him soon discover.
A novel from the Booker-Prize winning author Stanley Middleton. Rejacked and reissued in Windmill. Mary and David Blackwell are content in their marriage but when Mary, a talented opera singer, is offered the chance to sing in America, everything changes. David, a music teacher and amateur cellist, is left behind in England and, when he suddenly stops hearing from her, he must decide how to carry on and what to do. 'It is a very, very long time since any book made me physically cry. But Stanley Middleton's Valley of Decision did just that, twice... The story is simple... Anyone, well almost anyone, could write that story... But only Mr Middleton could turn it into something approaching a small masterpiece.' Martyn Goff, Daily Telegraph 'Increasingly, Middleton's command of the ordinary has become extraordinary... In this new novel the rigours and solaces of making music are cleverly (but uninsistently) counter-pointed with the human relationships that accompany them.' Anthony Thwaite, Observer
None
Psychologically acute without cant or dogma, Stanley Middleton puts before us another episode of a Human Comedy controlled and measured a la Trollope.