Evening Class Uk Edition - Hardcover

Binchy, Maeve

4.02

43,207 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0752804510 ISBN 13: 9780752804514

Publisher: Orion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ), 1996

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Maeve Binchy writes at the very top of her form in this novel of linked episodesabout a schoolteacher and his motley collection of students,who find extraordinary new leases of life through the Italian evening classes which he sets up after everything in his life goes wrong.

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Review:

Maeve Binchy can always be counted on to spin an involving tale about ordinary people that brings out the extraordinary in everyone. In Evening Class, Binchy zooms in on the working-class of Dublin. Schoolteacher Aidan Dunne organizes an evening class in Italian with the help of Nora O'Donoghue, an Irishwoman returning home after 26 years in Sicily. When the somewhat squashed-by-life denizens of the surrounding neighborhood take the unexpected step of enrolling in the class, they find their lives transformed.

Binchy tells her story from the viewpoints of eight different characters and rewards both them and her readers with happy endings after the requisite rocky road. Reading a novel by Maeve Binchy is like catching up with old friends--you know everything will turn out fine in the end, but you're still interested in how things get that way.

From the Publisher:

In Aiden Dunne's evening class, eight unlikely students gather every Tuesday and Thursday to learn Italian. Each person has a different reason for being there: There is Aiden himself, who is counting on the success of this class to make up for his waning career and family life; then Signora, the professoressa, who followed the man she loved to a faraway country and waited twenty-three years for him; Bill, the bank clerk and his spendthrift girlfriend, Lizzie; Connie, the society hostess with an oddly empty calendar; and Kathy, who takes the class at the urging of her sister, Fran, to relax from a demanding job, but who, through the people she meets, discovers a startling secret about her family that will change her future and the memories of her past.

As the class progresses, we learn more about the participants, and become thoroughly absorbed in each of their lives, watching their relationships grow throughout the year and culminating in a magical viaggio to Italy. In Evening Class, as in her ten previous bestsellers, Maeve Binchy depicts all that is extraordinary about ordinary lives and reaffirms her title as one of the most adored storytellers of our day.

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