Time To Dance

Description

A lifetime of restraint and placid affection erupts when a retired bank manager falls for a young girl, as far removed from him in background and experience as in age. Set in Cumbria, this is an intensely moving evocation of an overwhelming passion and its destructive kernel of jealousy.

Melvyn Bragg's first novel, FOR WANT OF A NAIL, was published in 1965 and since then his novels have included THE HIRED MAN, for which he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, WITHOUT A CITY WALL, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, CREDO, THE MAID OF BUTTERMERE and THE SOLDIER'S RETURN, which was published to huge critical acclaim in 1999 and won the WHSmith Literary Award. He has also written several works of non-fiction including SPEAK FOR ENGLAND, an oral history of the twentieth century, RICH, a biography of Richard Burton, ON GIANTS' SHOULDERS, a history of science based on his BBC radio series, THE ADVENTURE OF ENGLISH, 12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, IN OUR TIME and THE SOUTH BANK SHOW: FINAL CUT. He was born in 1939 and educated at Wigton's Nelson Thomlinson School and at Oxford where he read history. He is President of the National Campaign for the Arts, and in 1998 he was made a life peer. He won an Academy Fellowship at the BAFTA Television Awards in 2010.

The narrative of the obsession is told with great verve and conviction, from the first fortuitous encounter...to the open-ended conclusion - Penelope Lively, Evening Standard Vibrantly erotic...brave and searingly honest..compulsively gripping - Graham Lord, Sunday Times It is a sexy book. It is a romantic book. Its heart is the dream of great passion - Philippa Gregory, The Sunday Times The key to the success of the book is its simplicity and unpretentiousness...makes convincing the disorderly and unreasoning passion of the orderly and reasoning man - Rose Tremain, Listener