Susan Wicks

Biographical note:  Susan Wicks grew up in Kent, but has lived in France, Ireland and the US. She is the author of two previous novels, a short memoir, six collections of poetry and a book of stories. Her most recent book, Cold Spring in Winter, a translation of the French poet Valerie Rouzeau, was shortlisted for Canada’s prestigious Griffin Prize. She is married with two adult daughters.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781907773075
ISBN:  9781907773075
Author:  Susan Wicks
Title:  A Place to Stop
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Jan-12
Extent:  224pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  16 mm
Weight:  336 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 19.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  In the idyllic little village of Champfleury in south-west France, a web of lives interconnect, ready to unravel at the first touch. Into this world comes a walker who speaks to no one and moves on, but the smallest of his actions changes everything, and for everyone in this small community nothing will ever be the same.

Main description:  In an idyllic village in south-west France, a web of lives interconnect, ready to unravel at the first touch. Alex is running from a teenage love-affair that went badly wrong at home in England. Julien, the retired village schoolmaster, is struggling with loneliness and insomnia. Pete has everything – a wife who loves him, an existence of ease and freedom – yet he’s frightened of something. Magali wants so much more than the life her parents had. And Damien’s angry with all of it.

And then through their world passes a walker, or a pilgrim, on the old Santiago de Compostela pilgrim path. He accidentally moves a rock a couple of metres and continues on his way. And by the time he has travelled a few more slow days towards Santiago, the lives of every inhabitant of this small community will be irrevocably changed.

Table of contents:
A Place to Stop

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Excerpt from book:  

Prologue

She’s reading the note again. It’s hard to unfold, as if it’s been kept in the envelope too long. The words have been scrawled with a cheap biro and she can only just make them out, even though she’s read them so often she can still see them with her eyes closed. Or an after-image, floating diagonally upwards towards a spot over to the right and above her, burnt on to her retina in white light. She blinks. She runs her fingers over his signature. Jason. His handwriting’s terrible. And he hasn’t even managed to say more than a few words. Sorry, Al. He’s always called her Al, like he couldn’t quite convince himself she was a real girl, with a real girl’s name. I didn’t mean it to happen like that. I meant to tell you properly – honest. No kisses. Just his stupid unreadable name and the same word over and over. Sorry. Sorry.

She’s blitzing her room like she’s never quite managed to before, throwing the old Gap combats and T-shirts into a huge pile in the middle of the carpet and bagging them all up in black plastic to stuff into the bins outside. Old shoes – the strappy silver platforms she bought for the sixth-form ball, the flowered canvas baseball shoes she wore on the beach with him in Ibiza. His old grey sweater that she’s been wearing for at least two years now, fraying at the cuffs and elbows. The lovely interlocking silver ring he emptied his wallet for that time in York.

She isn’t going to cry. He’s not worth it. She can do so much better. As she tips another load of crumpled denim and polyester into the mouth of a black bag she catches sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror. The whites of her eyes have gone pink at the corners. Strands of hair are clinging to her cheeks, darker with sweat, almost brown. She just needs to let it all go, drift off somewhere where she won’t have to look. But in spite of herself she keeps seeing it, that night at Casa Mia – she can still feel the bass vibrating through the soles of her shoes, the flecks of light moving over people’s hair, and then outside the toilets that clapped-out leather sofa and something on it, someone, like a heap of coats heaving, separating, and she sees it’s Jason. He sits up, his hair all on end, and she can see the whites of the other girl’s eyes gleaming… She crumples up the pathetic excuse for an apology in her hand.

Minutes later she’s letting herself out and pulling the front door shut behind her. She doesn’t bother to take a key. She keeps her head down – she might bump into someone she knows. She picks her way among the oily puddles until she finds herself at the far end of the station car-park. Then she slips between the rows of parked cars to the brambles, the half-hidden gap in the fence that’s always been there, ever since they were little. She used to play here on summer evenings, with George and Tim and Samantha, all the old gang, and they’d dare one another to worm through.

Further down the platform people are waiting for the train from London. A man’s talking into a mobile, his head turned away. Kids are jostling for space on one of the metal seats, the concrete under their feet messy with polystyrene. She can smell their chips and cigarette-smoke from here, and sense their laughter. The ground under her own feet seems to lurch sideways slightly. She feels sick. She doesn’t want to sit with a gang of mates and have a laugh and eat junk food ever again. She moves right to the end of the platform, where there’s only a chavvy, wasted-looking female with a toddler and a baby in a three-wheeled buggy. The woman crouches down in her cheap jeans and high heels and reaches in to put something in the baby’s mouth. Revolting. She can see it in her mind’s eye, slimy and steaming. So that’s it, is it? This is where it’s all been leading, to a draughty station platform where a sleazy-looking bitch is knotting herself up into contortions over her disgusting excuse for a child?

But what else is there? It’s too late now. She’s had her chance. When all her friends from school went on to university she could have gone with them. But she chose to move in with Jason and start work at the call-centre. No one’s to blame for all this, no one except herself. She can still see the expression on her parents’ faces – almost like they didn’t believe what she was trying to tell them. Not that they’d said much. But even then she knew what they must be feeling. She swallows. In a few hours her mum’ll be coming back to the house to find the dustbins in the back garden gaping open, spewing out clothes and black plastic. Alex, darling … She winces at the bafflement in their voices. She can still hear her dad’s relief on the other end of the phone the day she told them she’d had it with Jason, she was coming home.

She walks forward right to the edge of the platform, across the yellow line. The metal rails gleam in a bed of blackened sleepers and chips of stone. A trapped crisp-packet shivers in the wind. She squints towards the horizon, where the rails meet. Fuck them all – the man talking into emptiness, the kids with their greasy mouths, the woman swivelling on her spike heels as her toddler writhes and arches its back to be set free. The A-levels and university open days, the wind-blown campuses with their echoing sports halls milling with people. Jason’s tiny kitchen with the mould-speckled blind and the view over roofs. Her mum and dad, even … None of it makes any difference now.

If I lean really far out I’ll be able to see the train coming before it comes, I’ll see the spot on the horizon like a bird getting nearer. I’ll hear the sound of the wheels before they clatter over the points. And then the driver sitting in his little window. I’ll meet his eyes. I’ll be a dot, a bird, a twig breaking, I’ll hear the thunder even before I see the spark.

Further down the platform someone shouts something. The mother catches at the older child and yanks him back, away from the edge. And then before she can do anything it’s on her in a rush of wind and noise and lit carriages. She glimpses the pink shades of the little lamps in the first-class compartments as they whip past. Her hair lifts with the whoosh of air as each carriage flicks away eastwards and settles again as the last one disappears into the tunnel. It’s too late. She’s lost her chance. Through a blur she sees the young woman pick up the dummy from where it’s rolled across the platform and wipe it against her denim thigh. The man with the mobile phone bends and slips it into a pocket of his briefcase. A lad with a shaved head kicks at a polystyrene tray until it slides over the edge onto the rails. She shivers again. Her eyes are hurting now with the strain of looking into the distance. The Eurostar’s miles away already. She imagines it like at the start of the local news on TV, the girls turning their heads and waving, the apple-blossom, the train streaking across flat fields towards those chalk cliffs and then out under the Channel on its way to France.

Unpublished endorsement:  The stories in the novel intersect and reflect on one another. Nothing is fixed, these are lives still being lived by people in a sensuously present locality which, like dreamers, they go beyond.

David Constantine

Unpublished endorsement:  I was compelled: impressed by the mixture of gravity and vivacity that informs every aspect of the novel. I recognised the world it portrays and yet I learned from it too. And all spun from a capacious, fine prose that sounds the depths and resonances of its sentences with admirable clarity.

Rachel Cusk

Unpublished endorsement:  This is a morality tale, in its most satisfying guise: a commentary on the disposition of our times, its temptations and its punishments, and at the same time a book of human character, of people's needs and losses, expectations and disappointments, of their weaknesses and their fragile unexamined strengths. I recognised the world it portrays and yet I learned from it too. And all spun from a capacious, fine prose that sounds the depths and resonances of its sentences with admirable clarity.

Rachel Cusk

Previous review quote:  Susan Wicks’s prose works find haunting new shapes for the practical and emotional dilemmas specific to modern women’s lives.

Stephen Burt
TLS

Previous review quote:  She is neither naïve nor inexperienced, and yet her writing has a bloom on it. There’s a fine surprise at the act of writing itself, and what it can accomplish.

Helen Dunmore
TLS

Previous review quote:  What a treat: at last someone has solved the problem of how to experiment, con brio, with time and form in the novel and yet keep it readable, accessible and full of heart.
(of: Little Thing)

Jo Shapcott
Independent on Sunday