Summer Things - Softcover

Connolly, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571195741 ISBN 13: 9780571195749

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1999

Synopsis

A hilariously deranged trip to the further shores of lust, snobbery and adultery, Summer Things is a comic novel by one of Britain's funniest novelists.

Elizabeth has her heart set on a traditional English seaside holiday (five-star - naturally), and her oh-so-well-to-do estate agent husband Howard agrees to pay, because that is largely what Howard is for. Except that he wants to stay in London with the object of his lust, Zoo-Zoo. Their neighbour Dotty, who envies like crazy Elizabeth's lifestyle (not to say all of her brand new summer things), determines on the very same holiday, but Dotty's impoverished husband comes up with an appalling alternative (don't even ask) while their fifteen year-old son Colin is yearning after a girl - any girl. Single parent Melody is going to the seaside too, and bringing her little baby Dawn, because there's nothing else to do with her. Whoever does eventually reach England's glittering coast is sure of meeting not only the very beautiful Lulu, but also John, her insanely jealous husband - or is that just insane? To say nothing of professional playboy and all round shit-of-the-year Miles McInerney: action is what he wants It really is one hell of a mix: will there be love, death - or just a string of good and bad summer things? What is certain, is that no-one's life will ever be exactly the same again.

About this title

Review:

Joseph Connolly's Summer Things is the ultimate clever English farce. Genteel Chanel-wearing Elizabeth loves nothing better than orchestrating the lives of her friends and neighbours and is given ample opportunity to do so when she goes on holiday to a smart English seaside resort with her man-mad sister Melody and her neighbours, Brian (DIY fanatic and obsessive collector of manhole covers) and clucky, baby- crazy Dotty. Estate-agent-husband Howard has his own private reasons for wanting to stay at home, while seventeen-year-old daughter Katie is off to Chicago on an illicit vacation with an older man.

In Summer Things Connolly blends to perfection that sort of smutty, innuendo-driven humour that the British are so good at with sharp social satire, exposing the lies frequently embedded in the very foundations of cosy middle-class married life and laying bare the secret tragedies hiding within the rib-cages of even the most ludicrous of his characters. Within this captivating web of deception, lie some truly unexpected twists. --Anna Davis

Review:

'The author has seen the world of human misery in a grain of seaside sand and his title is deeply, bleakly ironic ... Viciously funny' Daily Telegraph. (Daily Telegraph)

'This is not a book about love, but a book about illicit, breathless, self-absorbed couplings and that kind of panic-ridden snobbery so dear to the English middle-class mentality, all described with gusto and distaste' Literary Review. (Literary Review)

'Connolly has established himself as a very English comic author, in the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse' The Times. (The Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0571195741
• ISBN 13: 9780571195749
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384