The Golden Evening

From the Booker-Prize-winning author of Holiday. Rejacketed and reissued by Windmill to mark the 40th anniversary of Stanley Middleton's Booker Prize win.

He illuminates the important matters beneath the surface that ordinary people feel but rarely talk about

Middleton is a born writer; unpretentious, discerning, intelligent, and virtually incapable of writing a duff sentence. He is the Chekhov of suburbia; I recommend him.

Middleton contrasts claustrophobic middle-class respectability with a certain sexy dangerous Gothic Nottingham atmosphere.

Middleton is concerned with what goes on below the surface of lives, what people feel, dream about, hope for, resent, fear – all the things that in real life may be kept hidden… Anyone coming to Middleton afresh has a real treat in store.

Stanley Middleton was born in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire in 1919. He published his first novel, A Short Answer, in 1958 and went on to publish 45 novels in a career spanning fifty years. He was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974 with Holiday. Stanley Middleton died in July 2009.

From the Booker-Prize-winning author of Holiday. Rejacketed and reissued by Windmill to mark the 40th anniversary of Stanley Middleton's Booker Prize win. 
 
 
A brother and sister – Bernard is at college, Mary is still at school - are struggling with their own young lives and loves, near the end of one beautiful summer. At the same time, their mother Ivy is dying from cancer whilst their father, a simple and dignified man, is barely coping. A family faces fundamental changes, together and apart. 
 
'This humane book digs patiently beneath the surface of ordinary lives to the rock of universal truths.' Sunday Times 
 
'Stanley Middleton, once dubbed 'The Chekhov of suburbia', is to the Midlands suburb what Anne Tyler is to the Midwest picket fence. His careful writing creates an always precise and often unnerving picture of reality.' The Times

Live and Learn

From the Booker-Prize-winning author of Holiday.

Stanley Middleton has been described as ‘the Chekhov of suburbia’. Live and Learn explores the expanding possibilities the world offers to a young couple. 
 
Jonathan, a twenty-eight-year-old academic and a keen rugby player, and Emma, the solicitor daughter of a vicar, seem to have it all. But life, even solid provincial life, can be more precarious and extreme than it first appears. Sudden violence, even murder, can happen without warning, as Jonathan and Emma discover and in the process they come to a fuller understanding of how complex even the most straightforward life really is.

From the Booker-prize winning author

A Place to Stand

From the Booker-prize winng author of Holiday.

Noel's sister, Ethel, is dying, and for the first time since childhood, he spends a week in her company. As she drifts in and out of consciousness, he discovers more about her past, her fight for women's rights in education, and in the process reasses his own life. 
 
 Buried in this past is a secret infatuation for a man who reappears in Ethel's story, and that of her daughter, in a most unexpected way.

Brief Garlands

'Stanley Middleton, once dubbed "The Chekhov of Suburbia", is to the Midlands suburb what Anne Tyler isto the Midwest picket fence. His gentle, careful writing creates an always precise and often unnerving pictureof reality.' The Times

The comforts and terrors of middle-class provincial life have seldom been more sharply dissected than by Stanley Middleton, and his new novel adds to this social insight a new poignancy. As ageing slowly entwines John Stone, retired headmaster at Beechnall, his wife Peg and their various friends and relatives, and as past certainties recede, the solid, decent world of provincial life with its satisfactions and occasional minor adulteries gives way to new threats - some external, in the changing society around them, some internal. The question of how to live the good life, always near the centre of Middleton's novels, confronts the inhabitants of this quiet street of Victorian villas and is answered in surprising and disturbing ways.

Sterner Stuff

'Stanley Middleton, once dubbed "The Chekhov of Suburbia", is to the Midlands suburb what Anne Tyler is to the Midwest picket fence.' The Times

Frank Montgomery is in T.S. Eliot's 'middle way', Principal of an art college, coping with an aging father and a mother in law on the dark descent into Alzheimer's. His marriage is strong, his relationships supportive - but in one way Frank is extraordinary: he is being talked of as a major figure in British art, a figurative painter of national reputation with commissions beckoning right up to royalty. As he struggles to live the good life and to create, he is much concerned by issues in both work and life: is it better to do new things, or old things perfectly? 
 
In this novel, Frank's values are put to the test. 
 
Once again Stanley Middleton dissects middle England with his sharp but healing scalpel, and in the process he explores family life, generational change, and the true nature of art through the complexities, pains and joys of its creation.

Entry into Jerusalem

John Worth is an artist - not a Bohemian, but a stubborn and self-disciplined man. Friends and colleagues try to influence his work - his mistress wants him to introduce more political themes and his dealer urges him towards fugurative painting. But Worth, though tempted, resists all manipulation. The development must come from within himself; and through his painting Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem, he reveals an image of startling, shocking individuality. 
 
'Entry into Jerusalem is one of the best. Middleton has never written more economically or more pungently. He is a master of characterisation through dialogue adn of a succinct presentation of a complex relationship.' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'It makes me burst into superlatives.' Mail on Sunday

Stanley Middleton

Shortly before his death last year, Stanley Middleton completed this, his last novel, which concludes a unique depiction of middle-class life in 'Middle England', quietly and cumulatively over many volumes and decades. Once again we are in Beechnall, the constant setting of Stanley Middleton's novels, and his sense of place and his feeling for his characters remains as strong as ever. 
 
At the heart of A Cautious Approach is a tentative love story, which begins when two lonely men meet, out walking on Christmas Day: Andy invites George home, and there he meets the captivating Mirabel, Andy's former fiancée. George has been a teacher, but ill health has deprived him of his career and confidence, and he has retrained as a postman. This chance encounter, and others that follow, have the potential to shift George's life, and soon he is drawn into a set of uncertain relationships in which past experience, present stoicism and future expectation all play a part. 
 
As ever, but here for the last time, Stanley Middleton's bold experimentation with flashbacks, and the embedding of one scene or dialogue within another, gives added density to his depiction of ordinary, defiantly unfashionable human lives.

Stanley Middleton

Books by Stanley Middleton

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