Sue Gee

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Biographical note:  Sue Gee is an acclaimed and established novelist. Reading in Bed, (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club selection; The Mysteries of Glass (2005) was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She ran the MA Creative Writing Programme at Middlesex University from 2000-2008 and currently teaches at the Faber Academy. Sue Gee has also published many short stories, some of which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She lives in London and Herefordshire.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781907773068
ISBN:  9781907773068
Author:  Sue Gee
Title:  Last Fling
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-May-11
Extent:  176pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  264 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  

Main description:  This is the first short story collection from an acclaimed novelist with a wide and loyal readership. Many of the stories have won prizes, been published or broadcast; some are new, written especially for the collection.
Several feature artists, and are set in the past in a rural England; others are contemporary: stories set in London or Europe, of love glimpsed, lost, or longed for. ‘In Bratislava’ is the brief encounter between a lonely businessman and young student in the aftermath of communism. Two or three look at illness and mortality: in ‘Last Fling', the title story, a dying woman places a lonely hearts ad.
All these stories are written with Sue Gee's insight, precision and delicacy of style and tone. Her last novel, Reading in Bed (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club Selection; her next will be published in 2012. Poignant and haunting, immensely readable, Last Fling is the perfect book between the two.

Table of contents:
In Bratislava
Mother Duck
Back
Landscape at Iden
Outside the House
Pegwell Bay
Annunciation
Heading North
Five People Waiting
Days
For Life
Last Fling

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Excerpt from book:  

Landscape at Iden

Henry was consuming a pear. Alone in the panelled dining room, he spread his napkin, peeled the freckled yellow skin with an ivory-handled fruit knife, quartered the juicy white flesh. Sun gleamed here and there, striking the rim of a glass, a silver blade, the fruit dish. This, in the afternoons, was the darkest room in a house positioned for darkness: sunk below a towering bank at the back, the long lawn up there bordered by conifers. He had bought it when he had money, when post-war property was cheap, when he and Phyllida had been married just over a year. No one else wanted to live there, no servant would come there: all that way out in the middle of nowhere, all those rooms to clean. When the agent showed it, unlocking the door to the huge hall, putting back the shutters, it had been empty for months.

They climbed the great staircase, looked out of the master bedroom on to the drive, curving round uncut grass; scanned the tree-lined road, the glimpse of ditch and cornfield. They went into other bedrooms, while the agent looked for the stopcock; he came back, and ran rusty water into the ancient bath. Pipes banged and shook. They went down the back stairs, into the kitchen, where beetles scurried away beneath the vast black range. Outside, they climbed the flag-stoned steps up the bank, walked over the lawn. The autumn sun came out and the conifers cast dramatic shadows.

Behind this levelled stretch the ground rose again, became a wooded hillside.

They looked down on the house, so spacious and forbidding, and knew they would live there. Phyllida was young, just out of the Slade, and full of energy. Henry, rather older, had his inheritance. He had survived the war, and he knew how to invest: this would be their grand project. He made his offer on the fourteenth of October, 1919, and had it accepted at once. When the girls arrived, the house was filled with life, with calling voices. It was full of them still, all these years later: he was surrounded by women, calling mostly to each other.

Late September, Sunday afternoon, an Indian summer. Outside, the heat was intense, the air full of butterflies, dragonflies, bees. In here, such cool, such shady quiet. Henry finished the pear, his second, picked yesterday from the espaliered tree on the kitchen garden wall; his elbows rested on polished mahogany. He had noted Phyllida’s sigh as she rose from the table, leaving china, silver, crumpled linen, glasses with a residue of wine, all for him to clear. Too much eating, too much sitting about: her unspoken rebuke, as she swept the girls out with her. They patted him vaguely as they passed, dropped a kiss on his balding head.

— Dear Daddy.

— We’ll come and help you later.

A fly buzzed in through one of the tall casement windows, open to the front.

His geese were out there, asleep beneath the trees. Later he would go out with the bucket. Later he would clear the table. It was Sunday, there was plenty of time. He watched the fly, and reached for the jar of biscuits.

Sleepy, sleepy Somerset. Up on the back lawn, Phyllida had her easel out, stood obstinately before it in her sunhat, surveying mellow chimney stack and lichened tiles.

There had once been talk of doves — Think how lovely they’d look on the roof, said Henry, but this, like so many things, had never happened. — We can do anything we want, he said, but of course they couldn’t. He was given a snow-white goose and a gander: they bred, and he was happy. — Everything I want is here, he said. — You, the house, the girls — don’t you feel that, my darling? Phyllida?

Madeleine had dropped her sandals on the step by the back door: they were just visible from up here, unfastened from slender hot feet as she went indoors for a drink. Bare feet on a tiled floor: what bliss. A scattering of geranium petals lay on the flags, brushed off in Phyllida’s early morning watering of the pots, filling the tall grey can from the water butt. Down there, the darkness of the house was a refuge; up here on the baking lawn her hair clung to her head beneath the straw and a bead of sweat was trickling down her neck. She wiped it away, wiped a streak of burnt sienna on her shirt: the oils were almost melting. The painting had been troubling her for weeks; this meant her whole life was troubled. Should she flatten, foreshorten, dramatise? She wanted the plunge into darkness, the sunlit roof and dazzling grass above, and then the blank black windows on the façade, the fall into shadow, deep and endless. It was difficult, difficult. She could not get it right, could not decide.

Previous review quote:  Sue Gee writes subtly and deftly, observing with a wry and sympathetic eye … This is a hugely enjoyable and rewarding read.

The Independent

Previous review quote:  A beautifully observed tale, written with boundless compassion and humour.

Woman and Home magazine

Previous review quote:  Written with the delicate fluency of a storyteller utterly at ease with her craft.

Times Literary Supplement

Previous review quote:  Profound and lyrical, it’s full of light and darkness and the most marvellous description.

Shena Mackay
Observer

Previous review quote:  About Reading in Bed:
as seductively readable as its title suggests … draws the reader in with its skilful portrayal of real-life situations

The Times

Previous review quote:  About The Mysteries of Glass:

one of the most moving and beautifully written stories that I can remember.

Readers Books of the Year
Guardian