Dear Evelyn: Winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize - Softcover

Page, Kathy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911508288 ISBN 13: 9781911508281

Publisher: And Other Stories, 2018

Synopsis

Rare emotional veracity and a filmic evocation of a long marriage set against the backdrop of the changing 20th century

Born between the wars in a working-class South London street, Harry Miles is a sensitive and capable boy who attends school on a scholarship and grows into a thoughtful young man. Full of energy and literary ambition, he visits Battersea Library in search of New Writing: instead, however, he discovers Evelyn, a magnetic and independent-minded woman from a narrow, terraced street not far from his own.

This is a love story, albeit an unconventional one, about two people who shape each other as they, their marriage and their country change. From London before the sexual revolution to the lewd frescos of Pompeii, from the acrid devastation of Churchill’s North African campaign to the cloying bounty of new-built suburbs, Dear Evelyn is a novel of contrasts, whose portrait of a seventy-year marriage unfolds in tender, spare, and excruciating episodes.

About this title

Review:

`Disconcerting.. profoundly convincing' Nell Stevens, Times Literary Supplement ---- 'Page charts the emotional shifts that take place over the course of their marriage, from first flush of love to old age, with subtlety and sensitivity.' Mary Ellen Quinn, Booklist ---- `Marvellously well-crafted ... I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel.' Sarah Waters on The Story of My Face ---- `Alphabet is not just highly readable, but one of the strongest, most eloquent, most tightly constructed novels of the year.' Sunday Telegraph on Alphabet ---- `Sometimes novelists go too far - and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go.' Time Out on Alphabet ---- `Page's writing . . . is lit with an immediate sense of period, summoning images which are by turns softly painterly, sharply filmic or as murky as those first television images of the moon landing.' Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Kathy Page is the British-Canadian author of seven previous novels, including The Story of My Face (longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002) and Alphabet (nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in Canada in 2005), as well as Canada’s Giller Prize-shortlisted story collections Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016). Her new novel, Dear Evelyn, will be published in 2018 by And Other Stories in Europe and Biblioasis in North America. Born and raised in the UK, she now lives on Salt Spring Island, near Vancouver in Canada.

Praise for Dear Evelyn.

‘Disconcerting.. profoundly convincing’ Nell Stevens, Times Literary Supplement.

‘quietly devastating,’ Daily Mail.

'Page charts the emotional shifts that take place over the course of their marriage, from first flush of love to old age, with subtlety and sensitivity.' Mary Ellen Quinn, Booklist.

‘Kathy Page has written a work of great delicacy, truthfulness and intelligence – a clear-eyed and compassionate portrait of a marriage that lasts longer than most people’s lives. An unforgettable and deeply affecting examination of how it feels to grow old with someone.’ Carys Davies.

‘A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.’ Kirkus Reviews, starred review.

Praise for Kathy Page.

‘Kathy Page is a massive talent: wise, smart, very funny and very humane.’ Barbara Gowdy.

‘Page's writing . . . is lit with an immediate sense of period, summoning images which are by turns softly painterly, sharply filmic or as murky as those first television images of the moon landing.’ Times Literary Supplement.

‘Tight, strange, nifty stories’ Margaret Atwood on Paradise & Elsewhere. .

‘Marvellously well-crafted ... I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel.’ Sarah Waters on The Story of My Face. .

‘Alphabet is not just highly readable, but one of the strongest, most eloquent, most tightly constructed novels of the year.’ Sunday Telegraph on Alphabet.

About this edition

• Publisher: And Other Stories
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1911508288
• ISBN 13: 9781911508281
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320