The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life
William Nicholson
ISBN: 9781569476475
Published: July, 2010
Pricing
Hardcover $24.00
Paperback $14.00
More books by William Nicholson
Description
Laura is a happily married mother of two who begins to question her choices when her first love resurfaces after twenty years. She’s forced to compare the passion of that relationship with the domesticity of her suburban life. What if she’d stayed with him? Would she be happier? And what is happiness, really?
Little does she know t...
Laura is a happily married mother of two who begins to question her choices when her first love resurfaces after twenty years. She’s forced to compare the passion of that relationship with the domesticity of her suburban life. What if she’d stayed with him? Would she be happier? And what is happiness, really?
Little does she know that many others in her gentrified English village, including a rector who’s lost his faith, a frustrated school teacher, and a successful single mother who can’t get over her ex, are struggling with their own personal crises.
Media
“We long for characters that move through village life or suburbs like ticking time bombs and threaten to blow the whole charade like a bad movie. Nicholson's Henry and Laura, flirting with suburban danger, fill that need.”
—Los Angeles Times
“William Nicholson’s engaging, big-hearted sendup of upscale English country life,The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, set in that millennial year, feels utterly contemporary and oddly old-fashioned…This is a smart, sexually frank contemporary novel in which plot turns on letters and on devastating revelations in a quaint county newspaper. Readers may find themselves feeling nostalgic for the 20th century… [a] compulsively readable celebration of community, family ties, and the secret intensities of everyday life.”
—Boston Globe
“In this novel Nicholson puts everything plainly on the table: doubts, motivations, desires. You will search in vain for irony or a single smirk. You will find instead a tremendous sincerity. If that comes off as a little old-fashioned, it is also more than a little refreshing.”
—St. Petersburg Time
“Nicholson has a knack for crystallizing his themes in pivotal moments and deserves credit for not clouting the reader over the head with his affirmative message about the viability of two rapidly fading instituitions: long-term marriage and English country life.”