Stanley Middleton

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

Holiday

From the Booker-Prize-winning author of Holiday. Rejacketed and reissued by Windmill to mark the 40th anniversary of Middleton's Booker Prize win. David and Alison are a successful young couple planning their wedding, but they are surrounded by family and friends whose marriages have ended in failure. As each member of this close community struggles to make or re-make a life, Stanley Middleton tests the reality of present and past marriage, its possibilities and dangers, its hopes and fears. 'His reputation, built book by book, as an astute observer of middle-England bourgeois life and as a writer whose reach extends far beyond his immediate milieu, is probably now invulnerable.' Nicholas Wroe.' Times Literary Supplement 'Every page is taut with inner strength and truth.' Mail on Sunday

Married Past Redemption

Him They Compelled

Well crafted and absorbing. Middleton reproduces, with perfect pitch one painful progress of love going sour. --Publishers Weekly

Entry Into Jerusalem

In these words, the extraordinary, ordinary world of Stanley Middleton is delicately conjured: a finite world of infinite possibilities, the pattern there subliminally for his characters, but just out of reach. When Henry Shelton, a widower who teachers Latin part-time at a Midlands college, receives a letter from the forceful daughter of a woman with whom he had an affair as a schoolboy, the contact is not as it first seems, and he has cautiously to adjust to this and to his own lover's emotional vulnerability. The three of them inhabit a world which is nowhere near as stable as it first seems, although the chance of happiness is there, in a glimpse, for all of them. The path they tread toward the sea is charted by Stanley Middleton with all the skill of a master novelist.

Toward the Sea

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

Valley Of Decision

From Booker-Prize winning novelist Stanley Middleton. Thomas Harris is on the cusp of success as a classical composer with a growing reputation.When his father, a coal miner, dies Thomas decides to write a requiem for him which is also a thinly veiled attack on the powerful elite. In spite of opposition he finally succeeds in getting his work performed but how will the critics react?

Harris's Requiem

John Riley has been separated from his wife, Helen, for two years. Deeply involved with his work as an accountant, he has given little thought to saving his marriage until his mother announces that Helen wishes to see him. This work explores the complexities of marriage & family relationships across the generations.

Mother's Boy

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

Stanley Middleton

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