Book description
As playwright, painter and novelist, Richard Fenchurch has been both
successful and rich, but now, in his mid-sixties, he's beginning to fall
apart: again. His daughter plucks him from the squalor of his London
house and installs him in the old family home, the mansion where he
courted his first wife. Here, in a familiar house and in a changed
though recognisable landscape, Fenchurch struggles to keep his grip on
freedom and sanity, and allows himself to relax into memory. Time is
catching up with him, but it is memory that produces the more startling
revelation. Fenchurch's love for his wife was real enough - it was a
successful marriage as these things go - but the old surroundings, both
the building and the land itself, bring back to him the irresistibly
ardent drive of his passionate affair with Isabella, his fiancée's
mother. Returning to fiction after fourteen years, David Storey has
created both a sharply comic vision of the indignities of age and a
delicately erotic evocation of a youthful and dangerous affair. David
Storey was born in 1933 in Wakefield, and studied at the Slade School of
Art. His eight previous novels have won many prizes, including the
Macmillan Fiction Award, The Somerset Maugham Award, the Faber Memorial
Prize and, in 1976, the Booker Prize for
Saville.
He is also the author of fifteen plays. He lives in London.
