TEMPTATION - Softcover

Bolger

3.47

58 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006552366 ISBN 13: 9780006552369

Publisher: Flamingo, 2001

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A marriage and a family reach breaking point on an annual holiday in the loveliest hotel in Ireland.

Dermot Bolger is one of the leading figures on the Irish literary scene. Very influential, amazingly energetic and prolific, popular and extremely well respected.

Dermot writes fast-paced, incredibly readable novels, usually with a thriller element, always about Ireland, more often than not about its Troubles. ‘Temptation’ is quite different. It is about family life. It describes five days in the lives of Alison, her husband Peadar and their three children, who are taking their annual holiday on the southeastern coast of Ireland. Each member of the family has his or her own hopes for the holiday and preoccupations about the lives they are briefly leaving behind. The holiday serves as a turning point in their lives, as Alison and Peadar’s marriage is put to the test and the vulnerabilities of their children are brought to the fore.

Previous novels have always featured a female central character, and Dermot seems to love writing from a female perspective – and very good he is at it too. This new novel takes this strength and makes the most of it. Paciness and great readability are packed in there too.

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Review:

This is the kind of powerfully involving novel that comes along only rarely. Dermot Bolger's Temptation has as its central focus a family encountering an emotionally turbulent time on an annual holiday in a hotel on the beautiful Southeast coast of Ireland. Bolger's heroine, Alison Gill, is the mother of three children taking a much-anticipated annual family holiday at Fitzgeralds' Hotel, one of the most celebrated in Ireland. All seems idyllic until Alison is thrown into confused memories of the past when her husband is forced by a work crisis to return to Dublin and she encounters the attractive, disturbing Chris. He's a lover from 20 years ago, and soon Alison is forced to confront the choices she has made in her life. Is what she considered to be happiness really what she wanted? And if she gives in again to the sexual passion of her youth, will she find her real self--or destroy all that she has carefully built up? The canny reader will soon spot the presence of one of the finest writers in the English language as an inspiration for Bolger's highly assured novel. The Irish setting; a middle-aged woman dangerously attracted to a man who may be very bad news for her; the astonishingly sympathetic understanding of a female protagonist by a male writer: all of these are the hallmarks of the great William Trevor. But if the latter is an influence, Bolger is still very much his own man.

This is an immensely understanding and perceptive novel, with all the characters richly and quirkily characterised. His pi�ce de r�sistance, though, is his heroine: Alison is that rarity in modern fiction: a woman about whom the reader is allowed to frequently change their opinion. We are alternately moved or irritated by her, but always we are firmly locked in her consciousness. The writing, too, has an elegance that always ensures a rich experience for the reader and reminds us that the author has edited The New Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction

: She could never have understood back then how there might be other kinds of loneliness when living inside a family ... now at times their lovemaking felt like a habit without need of speech, an instinctive curling into safe, comfortable positions, his arms routinely around her as they slipped towards shared sleep.

--Barry Forshaw

Review:

‘An addictive read – a will-they-won’t-they adultery tale, told fast and furiously. More than confirms his reputation as a master storyteller.’ Sunday Express

‘A beautifully understated novel whose portrait of a self-doubting woman is handled with rare and sensitive perspicacity.’ Daily Mail

‘Bolger is a master storyteller...Temptation surely establishes him as one of the major Irish novelists of the past quarter century.’ Irish Post

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