A novel from the Booker-Prize winning author Stanley Middleton. Rejacked and reissued in Windmill.
Stanley Middleton was born in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire in 1919. He published his first novel, A Short Answer, in 1958 and went on to publish 45 novels in a career spanning fifty years. He was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974 with Holiday. Stanley Middleton died in July 2009.
Above all... there is some quality that is a mixture of craft and
integrity, compassion and the masterful effect of the unsaid, that
raises this novel to a very high level indeed.
*Daily Telegraph*
I urge readers to obtain this new and very fine book... I cannot
recommend it too highly.
*Financial Times*
It is a 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. Mary is a talented opera singer, married to David,
a musician, for three years. She is offered the chance to sing in
America in an opera that might just lead to a major career. She
takes it and falls in love with her producer. Anyone, well almost
anyone, could write that story. But only Mr Middleton could turn it
into something approaching a small masterpiece.
*Daily Telegraph*
Increasingly, Middleton’s command of the ordinary has become
extraordinary, in laconic descriptions, and in unflinchingly facing
moral imperatives which are always bedded in real, even humdrum,
circumstances. And in this new novel the rigours and solaces of
making music are cleverly (but uninsistently) counter-pointed with
the human relationships that accompany them.
*Observer*
Both an achievement and a promise without limit
*The Times*
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