The Long View (Picador Classic, 40) - Softcover

Howard, Elizabeth Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447272242 ISBN 13: 9781447272243

Publisher: Picador, 2016

Synopsis

With an introduction by Hilary Mantel.

Originally published in 1956, The Long View is Elizabeth Jane Howard's uncannily authentic portrait of one marriage and one woman. Observant and heartbreaking, written with exhilarating wit, it is a gut-wrenching account of the birth and death of a relationship – as extraordinary as it is timeless.

One of his secret pleasures was the loading of social dice against himself. He did not seem for one moment to consider the efforts made by kind or sensitive people to even things up: or if such notions ever occurred to him, he would have observed them with detached amusement, and reloaded more dice.

In 1950s London, Antonia Fleming faces the prospect of a life lived alone. Her children are now adults; her husband Conrad, a domineering and emotionally complex man, is a stranger. As Antonia looks towards her future, the novel steadily moves backwards in time, tracing Antonia's relationship with Conrad to its beginning in the 1920s, through years of mistake and motherhood, dreams and war.

About this title

Review:

Beautifully written and richly perceptive, Daily Telegraph

When I read The Long View . . . I realized I would never write anything of such subtlety and penetration: there was no point in even hoping to write a novel if this was the standard of excellence -- Andrew Brown, Guardian

What a beautiful, subtle, endlessly insightful writer. What compassion, what mesmerising detail, what godlike lightness of touch -- Chris Cleave, Guardian

Book Description:

From the bestselling author of The Light Years and Marking Time comes a revealing portrait of a marriage.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1447272242
• ISBN 13: 9781447272243
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480