The Flight of the Maidens: A Novel - Hardcover

Gardam, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786708794 ISBN 13: 9780786708796

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2001

Synopsis

Deliciously, with keen perception and touching humanity, this new novel from one of England's most gifted writers follows three young Yorkshire women, all of them scholarship girls, through the weeks preceding their departures for university in Cambridge and London. If they face the future with innocence and uncertainty, their parents and guardians belong in spirit to an England now past, even as they gaze upon a world that has been utterly altered by six long years of war. It is the summer of 1946. In this time of clothing coupons and social readjustment, Hetty Fallowes struggles intellectually to become independent of her possessive and tactless but loving mother, while her best friend, Una Vane, asserts her nascent womanhood with a sexually interesting fellow from the wrong side of the Yorkshire tracks. And Liselotte Klein, a Jewish refugee who arrived fat, solitary, and clever from Hamburg in 1939, comes through painful trials in London and California to surprising possibilties. By summer's end, all three have begun to learn they know neither everything nor nothing.

About this title

About the Author:

Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year. She is winner of the David Higham Prize, the Royal Society for Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and the Silver Pen Award from PEN. Her novels include: God on the Rocks, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Old Filth, a finalist for the Orange Prize; The Man in the Wooden Hat, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book prize, and Last Friends, finalist for the Folio Award. She lives in the south of England, near the sea.

From Publishers Weekly:

Here is a great vacation read but it's definitely not a throwaway. Prolific English novelist Gardam, Whitbread Award winner for both The Hollow Land and Queen of the Tambourine, has crafted a story through which readers can step into 1946 England. The war is over and the world is profoundly changed, though some of the old trappings remain, reminders of a faded past. Three Yorkshire girls of considerable intelligence but modest means have earned scholarships to universities in Cambridge and London; the novel is set during the summer before their departure for university. Hetty Fallowes decides "to be ruthless and positive and in charge of [her] own soul." She rebels against her quirky parents, especially her pious mother, who married her intellectual, grave-digging father for love and now regrets it. Plucky Una Vane's mother is using her dead father's office (he was a doctor) as a beauty parlor; Una develops leftist leanings and embarks on a romance with Ray, a boy of questionable background. Lieselotte Klein is a Jewish-German refugee who came to the village as a child to live with a Quaker family. At 17, she is suddenly sent to stay with a strange, elderly Jewish couple in London and finally, briefly, with distant relatives in California. All characters, major and minor, are superbly developed and convincing. The portrait of postwar England as conventions crumble and the country is rebuilt is terrific, drawn by a writer whose attention to detail recreates, lovingly and with bright flashes of wit, another time and place. (July)Forecast: Strong reviews and favorable word-of-mouth will be crucial to help build an American readership for this fine import.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0786708794
• ISBN 13: 9780786708796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288