Aphrodite's Hat

Description

A wonderful collection of stories from the much-loved Salley Vickers. The stories in this long-awaited collection by Salley Vickers all deal with psychological aspects of love: love given and withheld, love craved and lost, love met and disappointed; the differing shades of loves between friends, between parents and children, between children and other adults; love even, in one case, for a pet. Psychologically acute, sharply written in lucid and often witty prose, these stories, set in Venice, Greece and Rome as well as London and the English countryside, take us into the complex geography of the human heart. Sometimes joyous and humorous, sometimes melancholy and poignant, this collection confirms Salley Vickers' reputation as one of our most subtle and engaging writers.

Salley Vickers divides her time between London, the West Country and Venice. Previously a university lecturer in English, when not writing she practices as a psychologist and still lectures widely on the connections between literature, psychology and religion.

'Aphrodite's Hat is an assured debut, confidently ranging across moods and voices, and deftly pinpointing the moments when her characters most truly reveal themselves. Vickers [puts] love and art into the form.' Observer 'Sparkles with dry wit and shrewd insights ... terrific' Mail on Sunday 'A box of delights ... the emotional and technical range of this collection is both impressive and delightfully disorienting ... Frank O'Connor famously said that is was possible for a bad writer to write a good novel, but only a really good writer could write a decent short story. Vickers's first collection proves beyond doubt that she's a really good writer.' Frank Cottrell Boyce, Guardian 'A deceptively wild, seamlessly well-crafted collection' The Times 'Beautifully simple with a devastating emotional climax ... with the collection, Vickers proves herself a formidable and astute chronicler of the psychology of love' Sunday Times Praise for Salley Vickers: 'Salley Vickers is a writer whose subtle intelligence and unobtrusive command of narrative I always enjoy. She sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand, and she knows how the world works; and these qualities are much rarer than they should be. She's a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.' Philip Pullman 'If you enjoy the work of Marilynne Robinson, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Salter or Anita Brookner, you should be reading Vickers. All these authors reflect, with grace and gravity, on life's moments of sorrowful epiphany.' Michael Dirda, Washington Post 'There is something rare and special about Vickers as a novelist. In exploring the connections between faith and imagination, art and redemption, religion and science in an intelligent, unusual but very readable way, she manages to touch something buried deep in all of us. It gives her work a quietly compelling quality.' Peter Stanford, Independent