Holiday

Stanley Middleton’s prize-winning novel is both a precisely observed portrait of English provincial life and a moving exploration of grief and regret.

"We need Stanley Middleton to remind us what the novel is about. Holiday is vintage Middleton... One has to look at nineteenth-century writing for comparable storytelling."  -  Sunday Times

Edwin Fisher is at the seaside, but this is no normal beach holiday. To escape the death of his son and the death-throes of his marriage, he has retreated to a place where he had once known the unqualified happiness of childhood. But as painful memories rise unbidden and uncontrolled, Edwin must confront each in turn – realising that without a past there can be no future.

"At first glance, or even at second, Stanley Middleton's world is easily recognizable... The excellence of art, for Middleton, is an exact vision of real things as they are. And because he is himself so exact an observer, his world at third glance can seem strange and disturbing or newly and brilliantly lit with colour."  -  A.S. Byatt

Stanley Middleton was born in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire. He published his first novel, A Short Answer, in 1958. Middleton went on to publish 45 novels in a career spanning 50 years. He was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974, with Holiday.