Evening Class - Hardcover

Binchy, Maeve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385318073 ISBN 13: 9780385318075

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 1997

Synopsis

Maeve Binchy has captured the hearts of readers with her spectacular national bestsellers Circle of Friends, The Glass Lake, and This Year It Will be Different. Now she dazzles us once again with a new novel that is filled with her signature warmth, wit, and unforgettable characters--a powerful, moving tale of ordinary men and women whose quiet lives hide the most unexpected things.

Aidan Dunne, a Dublin Latin teacher, always meant to go back to the Italy he visited as a youth. But as the years passed, he concentrated instead on the usual struggles of daily life, like vying for the job of headmaster at his school, keeping memories of Italy in the back corners of his mind. At forty-eight, emotionally distanced from his wife, baffled by his two grown daughters, Aidan Dunne might have given up entirely if it hadn't been for the evening class. His class. A class called Introduction to Italian. A class where people from every walk of life come together. A class where long-buried hopes come alive again.

The teacher is Signora, a vivacious, eccentric woman with an irrepressible nature and a buried past. Her real name is Nora O'Donoghue, a Dublin native who abandoned Ireland decades before to follow her mysterious lover to Italy. Having defied her parents' Catholic conventions, she ended up in a village where tradition dictated everything--including how a woman could love or grieve. Now, as she meets Aidan Dunne and the men and women who come together each Tuesday and Thursday night, Signora begins to learn their secrets and their dreams. And slowly she transforms each of their lives.

Suddenly Aidan Dunne's last chance, his evening class has become a place of intrigue and revelation. Here Bill, a reliable bank clerk, uncovers the hidden source of his fiancee Lizzie's outrageous behavior. Teenage Kathy, slow at day school but bright as a button with Signora, is coming close to realizing a devastating truth about her family. Streetwise Lou, his tuition paid by a crime boss, has his own agenda for the group. And mousy Fiona decides to meddle in a married man's illicit affair--with repercussions for everyone, including Signora and Aidan Dunne.

In writing that is wise and evocative, powerful and moving, Maeve Binchy brings to life a story of families and lovers, of unrealized passions and moments of triumph, of wounds made by caring too much, or not caring at all. And in Evening Class she shows us the power of a  dream to expand horizons, and transform clerks and schoolteachers into heroes.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0385318073
• ISBN 13: 9780385318075
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432