Book description
A lifetime of restraint and placid affection erupts when a retired bank
manager falls for a youngh girl. Set in Cumbria, this is an intensely
moving evocation of an overwhelming passion and its destructive kernel
of jealousy. 'The narrative of the obsession is told with great verve
and conviction, from the first fortuitous encounter...to the open-ended
conclusion' Melvyn Bragg's first novel, FOR WANT OF A NAIL, was
published in 1965 and since then his novels have included THE HIRED MAN,
for which he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, WITHOUT A CITY WALL,
winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, CREDO, THE MAID OF BUTTERMERE
and THE SOLDIER'S RETURN, which was published to huge critical acclaim
in 1999 and won the WHSmith Literary Award. He has also written several
works of non-fiction including SPEAK FOR ENGLAND, an oral history of the
twentieth century, RICH, a biography of Richard Burton, ON GIANTS'
SHOULDERS, a history of science based on his BBC radio series, THE
ADVENTURE OF ENGLISH, 12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, IN OUR TIME and
THE SOUTH BANK SHOW: FINAL CUT. He was born in 1939 and educated at
Wigton's Nelson Thomlinson School and at Oxford where he read history.
He is President of the National Campaign for the Arts, and in 1998 he
was made a life peer. He won an Academy Fellowship at the BAFTA
Television Awards in 2010.
