In the 1930s, Henry and Helen Williamson arrive on the French Riviera looking for a house. Barely thirty, Henry has been forced to retire from the Indian civil service through ill-health. They fall in love with the dreamlike Lou Paradou and set about constructing a life of ease, and a ravishing garden. But as the political conflict gathers, so the atmosphere of their new home becomes increasingly unquiet and a tragic fate befalls them. THE LONG AFTERNOON enchants and involves the reader, just as the Williamsons' garden seduces its visitors.
Giles Waterfield was brought up in Paris and Geneva. Having worked at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and for sixteen years as Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, in 1996 he abandoned arts administration in order to write, teach and curate exhibitions. This is his first novel.
Title: The Long Afternoon
Author: Waterfield, Giles
ISBN: 9780747268482
Binding:
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
Publication Date: 2001-03-01
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 0.3584 kg
'Like an Anita Brookner story, Giles Waterfield's first novel describes a complete emotional world lived out in claustrophobic surroundings. This beguilingly old-fashioned novel ... Like all good period pieces, Waterfield evokes the allure of a vanished life-style, while exposing its more ludicrous excesses' Independent
'This haunting first novel is a study of marriage, love and fear. An almost perfect period piece' Express
'elegantly understated style... gentle and humane' Guardian
`Waterfield has captured to perfection the languid, leisured expat lifestyle... culminating in a terrible, haunting, unexpected ending'
Daily Mail
'This is a beautiful book based on Waterfield's grandparents. He writes with a clarity sweetened with kindness about their fear and confusion and about their flaws of character that rendered them unable to survive the changes forced upon them.' the Times
'Extraordinary first novel' Express (in round-up of hottest reads for the summer)
' Giles Waterfield,formerly Director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery took the McKitterick with his troubling,unsentimental elegy.for an English family living on the French Riviera . . . This year's McKitterick and Sagittarius contenders included names already eminent in neighbouring fields: the poet and journalist Blake Morrison; the academic and short-story writer, Jane Stevenson; the former Beiruit hostage and memoirist Brian Keenan; and the journalist Brian Clarke' Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'Giles Waterfield's exquisitely poised first novel THE LONG AFTERNOON is set in the Riviera resort of Menton between and during the world wars: luxe, calme et volupte interrupted by a quiet but resonant tragedy' Lucy Hughes Hallett in The Sunday Times
