Stanley Middleton – författare

'In a town like Beechnall there are all sorts of rivalries, enmities and feuds.' And many of them soon swirl around the amateur dramatic society's festival production of Twelfth Night, which is under a cloud after politics result in the departure of the established director. Extra-marital affairs, encroaching violence and emotional turmoil threaten what seems like a placid, middle-class Midlands town, and soon Alicia Smallwood, Middleton's heroine, is confronted with serious choices. Once again Stanley Middleton weaves a strong web of intrigue around ordinary provincial life - which turns out, as the plot unfolds, not to be so ordinary after all.

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.

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.

'He had in some sense, prepared the trap and fallen into it. He shuddered inside his newly dead universe. ' As a young boy, Frank Stapleton stumbles upon an unanswerable question about life and its meaning, and is devastated at the outcome. Now, half a century later and in retirement after a successful professional career, Frank has to face his doubts again through the problems of his family, colleagues and friends; in particular his son Stuart and his wife Francesca, who despite giving the appearance of a successful modern couple are about to part. It takes an unexpected potential tragedy to bring the story to its climatic resolution, and to an answer to the question posed to Frank all those years before.

'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.

Stanley Middleton has been described as ‘the Chekhov of suburbia’. Live and Learn explores the expanding possibilities the world offers to a young couple.Jonathan, a twenty-eight-year-old academic and a keen rugby player, and Emma, the solicitor daughter of a vicar, seem to have it all. But life, even solid provincial life, can be more precarious and extreme than it first appears. Sudden violence, even murder, can happen without warning, as Jonathan and Emma discover and in the process they come to a fuller understanding of how complex even the most straightforward life really is.

When Tim Hughes joins his precocious schoolfriend Julian in a holiday job sorting out the library of an elderly neighbour, Harald Meades, he doesn't comprehend the emotions, both adult and adolescent, with which he is about to tangle. Harald's mathematician son and his wife are planning to part, and the arrival of their daughter Harriet soon transforms the thoughts and feelings of both boys and puts each to a different test - while the life of their parents and of Meades himself are also changed radically. In his fortieth book, a tragi-comedy of three generations, Stanley Middleton triumphantly proves that he has lost none of the sureness of feeling for his characters, the sense of place or the psychological insights which are so much a part of his earlier novels.

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

John Taylor, an accountant, has been deserted by his wife, Stella, after three years of marriage. He struggles to make sense of his life. At a concert he meets his old music master, Michael Alexander, whose son Sebastian, an international cello virtuoso, is the evening's soloist. Stella soon returns to her husband's house, asking if he will take her back. Taylor, who is having an affair with his secretary, is much perplexed. The Taylors and the Alexanders, Michael, Sebastian and his opera-singer wife, meet, talk, and are gradually altered by the meetings. Slowly the estrangled Taylors come together, and the two families change to reach a compromise which is seen as love.

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

A chance encounter with an old schoolfriend confronting a devastating disease leads Colin Turnbull to reassess his life. Everything had seemed in place: academic brilliance, marriage to his boss's daughter and a formidable career. But, as Colin discovers, these apparent certainties can swiftly evaporate.

John Worth is an artist - not a Bohemian, but a stubborn and self-disciplined man. Friends and colleagues try to influence his work - his mistress wants him to introduce more political themes and his dealer urges him towards fugurative painting. But Worth, though tempted, resists all manipulation. The development must come from within himself; and through his painting Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem, he reveals an image of startling, shocking individuality. 'Entry into Jerusalem is one of the best. Middleton has never written more economically or more pungently. He is a master of characterisation through dialogue adn of a succinct presentation of a complex relationship.' Sunday Telegraph'It makes me burst into superlatives.' Mail on Sunday

Frank Montgomery is in T.S. Eliot's 'middle way', Principal of an art college, coping with an aging father and a mother in law on the dark descent into Alzheimer's. His marriage is strong, his relationships supportive - but in one way Frank is extraordinary: he is being talked of as a major figure in British art, a figurative painter of national reputation with commissions beckoning right up to royalty. As he struggles to live the good life and to create, he is much concerned by issues in both work and life: is it better to do new things, or old things perfectly?In this novel, Frank's values are put to the test.Once again Stanley Middleton dissects middle England with his sharp but healing scalpel, and in the process he explores family life, generational change, and the true nature of art through the complexities, pains and joys of its creation.

John Riley is in his early-thirties and 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. John's mother and father are also separated - his father has been confined to a nursing home due to the onset of Alzheimers - and as John and Helen work out their past differences his parents' relationship deteriorates. Stanley Middleton brilliantly explores the complexities of marriage and family relationships across the generations.

The comforts and terrors of middle-class provincial life have seldom been more sharply dissected than by Stanley Middleton, and his new novel adds to this social insight a new poignancy. As ageing slowly entwines John Stone, retired headmaster at Beechnall, his wife Peg and their various friends and relatives, and as past certainties recede, the solid, decent world of provincial life with its satisfactions and occasional minor adulteries gives way to new threats - some external, in the changing society around them, some internal. The question of how to live the good life, always near the centre of Middleton's novels, confronts the inhabitants of this quiet street of Victorian villas and is answered in surprising and disturbing ways.

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?

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

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.

From the Booker-Prize-winning author of Holiday. Rejacketed and reissued by Windmill to mark the 40th anniversary of Stanley Middleton's Booker Prize win. A brother and sister – Bernard is at college, Mary is still at school - are struggling with their own young lives and loves, near the end of one beautiful summer. At the same time, their mother Ivy is dying from cancer whilst their father, a simple and dignified man, is barely coping. A family faces fundamental changes, together and apart.'This humane book digs patiently beneath the surface of ordinary lives to the rock of universal truths.' Sunday Times'Stanley Middleton, once dubbed 'The Chekhov of suburbia', is to the Midlands suburb what Anne Tyler is to the Midwest picket fence. His careful writing creates an always precise and often unnerving picture of reality.' The 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.