Stanley Middleton – författare

THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL2019 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

Shortly before his death last year, Stanley Middleton completed this, his last novel, which concludes a unique depiction of middle-class life in 'Middle England', quietly and cumulatively over many volumes and decades. Once again we are in Beechnall, the constant setting of Stanley Middleton's novels, and his sense of place and his feeling for his characters remains as strong as ever. At the heart of A Cautious Approach is a tentative love story, which begins when two lonely men meet, out walking on Christmas Day: Andy invites George home, and there he meets the captivating Mirabel, Andy's former fiancée. George has been a teacher, but ill health has deprived him of his career and confidence, and he has retrained as a postman. This chance encounter, and others that follow, have the potential to shift George's life, and soon he is drawn into a set of uncertain relationships in which past experience, present stoicism and future expectation all play a part. As ever, but here for the last time, Stanley Middleton's bold experimentation with flashbacks, and the embedding of one scene or dialogue within another, gives added density to his depiction of ordinary, defiantly unfashionable human lives.

Henry Fairfax's life is one of orderly routine: accounting and management by day, the writing of radio plays by night, and a circle of friends. But only a few years ago he had lived through a painful divorce after nine years. And very early in the narrative, surprised by a sudden attack in the night, Fairfax stops a would-be mugger with a heavy right-hand blow. But what is he to think when Laura, now an independent, successful businesswoman, suggests that they marry again? They had parted loathing each other. And yet it possible that Henry's heart, like the mugger, may surprise him. Stanley Middleton's novel treats once more of the choices that seemingly comfortable people have to make. The issues he raises speak to the human condition, and make moving drama of our daily lives.