Mr Golightly's Holiday
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
1. holiday: a period in which a break is taken from work or studies for rest, travel, or recreation. [literally: holy day]
Many years ago, Mr. Golightly wrote a work of dramatic fiction that grew to be an astonishing international bestseller. But his reputation is on the decline and he finds himself badly out of touch with the modern world. He decides to take a holiday and comes to the historic village of Great Calne, hoping to use the opportunity to bring his great work up to date. But he soon finds that events take over his plans and that the themes he has written on are being strangely replicated in the lives of the villagers around him.
As he comes to know his neighbors better, Mr. Golightly begins to examine his attitude toward love and to ponder the terrible catastrophe of his only son's death. And we begin to learn the true, and extraordinary, identity of Mr. Golightly and the nature of the secret sorrow that haunts him and links him to his new friends.
Mysterious, light of touch, witty, and profound, Mr Golightly's Holiday confirms Salley Vickers's reputation as a writer of "fiction that entertains even as it considers serious questions of sin and redemption, love and loss" (Francine Prose, People).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English author Vickers (Miss Garnet's Angel) has a light hand with themes that touch on issues of faith and sin, and her tale of Mr. Golightly, taking a break from his labors in a Devonshire village to see if he can create a worthy successor to his hugely popular and influential first book, begins with wonderful promise. Mr. Golightly's real identity, as well as that of his magnum opus and his chief business rival, is hinted at with delightful delicacy; and the fact that he chooses not to create any supernormal happenings, but to deal bemusedly with the people of his creation just as they are, makes him particularly endearing. Vickers is on sure ground with her creation of the more raffish of Golightly's new neighbors, but the introduction of a ravaged widow, Ellen Thomas, moves the book into murkier psychological waters. After a while the book's good humor begins to evaporate, and there is a highly melodramatic climax, followed by a weird chapter of discussion between Golightly and his rival that is reminiscent of the conclusion of The Brothers Karamazov and seems quite jarringly out of place. Vickers has a delightful if occasionally overwhimsical wit and writes charmingly of nature, human and otherwise, but the book fails to live up to its highly original central conceit.
