A married man returns alone to the seaside town where he used to holiday as a child. A multi-layered story of marriage, death, seduction and separation - a novel about lives in crisis. WINNER of the Booker Prize For Fiction.Stanley Middleton, in his late 80's is still publishing a novel a year with Hutchinson. He has written 43 novels, Holiday being his best known through winning the Booker Prize. He lives in Nottingham.He writes like God's spy, and he notices the precise things that define people beyond their own opinions of themselves - The Guardian As good as any novelist writing - Daily Telegraph As with everything Middleton writes, a great deal rustles beneath the surface - D.J. TaylorAlso available from Five Leaves is Stanley Middleton at Eighty, edited by David Belbin and John Lucas.
Stanley Middleton is 90 next year, and has published more than 40 novels. Middleton's Holiday is about a middle-aged man, recently separated from his wife, who returns to a seaside town he knew in his childhood. He thinks about his past, talks to strangers and keeps bumping into his in-laws, who, as if from malign purpose, are holidaying in the same shabby resort. Though designed to be contemporary, it feels as though it belongs to the 1950s. It is a world in which a woman might decline an invitation to the cinema because "I'm not dressed for it", and even calls its protagonist by his surname......Holiday captures rather brutally the private condescension of its main character to the fleshy holidaymakers who surround him, "Lancashire girls in their innocent bikinis" and their flabby beaux, the prematurely ageing wives, the smirking husbands with their dirty talk. He renders perfectly the "inquisitorial civility" of his landlady - "People without culture or subtlety". The book is as observant and morose as its protagonist. "The whole world he saw in a dazed disproportion." Gruesomely exact about the small talk, the diet and the prejudices of these characters, it is a novel rooted in the shabbiness of ordinary England. The protagonist contemplates adultery, but returns to his intelligent, unaffectionate wife. "Risk did not appeal."
Jolhn Mullan
...I would never have read Holiday if it weren't for this trawl through past Booker winners, nor heard of its author (even though he's written more than 40 well-regarded books)... More to the point, if it weren't for the Booker, I'd have missed a treat. Holiday is one of those books that the enemies of literary fiction often complain about: a novel in which "nothing happens" - or at least, all the action takes place inside the head of a determinedly average middle-class character. In the physical world, little more takes place than that the protagonist, a lecturer in education called Edwin Fisher, goes on holiday to an old-fashioned "nineteen-thirties sunshine shoddy" seaside resort, has a few awkward bed-and-breakfast fry-ups, chats to some girls on the beach, mooches on the prom, meets his father-in-law a few times, has an inebriated fondle with a married woman and then returns home to the wife he has recently left...
Sam Jordison
This author reminds me of Checkov in the way that he can use just a few words to conjure a picture so bright and clear that it springs into your mind fully formed. But his biggest strength is in the way that he captures the way that we, ordinary people, think and behave and interact with one another.This was the first of his books which I read (in 2004), since then I've read several more and in my opinion he just gets better and better.Buy it! read it! You won't regret it.
Stuart Gaskell
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