August

Description

Ever since Aldous Jones careened over the handlebars of his bicycle in 1955 and landed next to farmer Evans's first field, it has been a tradition for him to take his family camping in Wales. Aldous starts to feel that a certain symbiosis has developed between their North London home and the Welsh village that they only ever see in August. As the years pass, Aldous's family idyll starts to disintegrate and the farm becomes a place drenched in memory. A stunning and unforgettable novel, Woodward's beautiful prose skilfully turns the mesmerising story of one family's happiness and grief into an elegy for the charms of post-war English family life and the child's-eyeview that failed to see darkness lurking behind the jollity. From the wayward genius of an eldest son, Janus, to the exuberant, witty but ultimately unstable Colette - all the characters in this book will haunt the reader long after they have put it down.

Gerard is the author of an acclaimed sequence of novels, August (shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award), I'll Go to Bed at Noon (shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and A Curious Earth. He was born in London in 1961, and published several prize-winning collections of poetry before turning to fiction. His latest collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians was shortlisted for the 2005 T.S.Eliot Prize. He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Bath with his family.

A striking and impressive work...one of the most original novels of the year * Observer * Simply one of the finest books about the pains and joys of family that I have ever read. The life of the Jones family glows like a barley-sugar window * Time Out * A brilliantly written first novel... Spirit of time and place is lovingly remembered, steeped in nostalgia yet never sentimental... This is a novelist at work, glorifying in the old-fashioned virtues of plot and character...rendered in graceful prose that is beguiling and charming * Mail on Sunday * Full of enjoyably acute social observation, August offers an absorbing account of a now vanished era of English life... Beguiling * The Times * Gerard Woodward's first novel is founded on the brilliantly simple premise of portraying a family and its inexorable implosion through a succession of August camping holidays... A strong narrative, powered by cunningly withheld information and the threat of crisis * Independent *