Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6689 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Daily Telegraph
'Day is among the finest bits of British prose fiction to appear for ages'

Glamour
`... be amazed by the emotional punch of this moving portrayal of the brutality of war'

Sunday Times
'powerful novel ... deserved winner of the 2007 Costa Book of the Year'

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
This book has received all sorts of rave reviews and I looked forward to reading it. Unfortunately I found it to be very disappointing. Its disjointed style just didn't hold my attention at all and it was a struggle to get through even though it is quite a small book.

A blemished tour de force
With "Day" Miss Kennedy joins the distinguished group of women writers who describe actual combat in war. Brilliantly written, the underlying obsession is not war as such, but Miss Kennedy's own inner demons. An over-elaborate plot spoils the narrative.

"Day" is well researched, and wears its erudition lightly. The central character is realised in the round, and is attended by a large number of subsidiary characters. These are 2-dimensional, giving the book an empty, surreal quality. Miss K is good on wartime RAF slang and wartime RAF jokes, memorably so. Unfortunately this type of humour drives out her own personal brand of excoriating wit, which is less in evidence in "Day" than in any of her books so far. The focus on war-time horror slips far too frequently onto more gratuitous acts of violence.

As an anti-War book "Day" does not quite cut the mustard. Miss Kennedy's moral eye is squinting. The bombing of Hamburg is equated with the extermination of Jewish villagers by their Ukranian neighbours. Random acts of violence, including grievous bodily harm and parricide, are treated as adventitious. Miss Kennedy's moral indignation leads nowhere. The constant shifting of focus between place and time gives the story depth but is wearisome. The love interest is unconvincing, its emphasis on physicality leaving a vacuum at its heart.

Altogether "Day" reinforces the impression that Miss Kennedy is a wayward genius who is always worth reading but who never quite manages to get her act together, a short story writer rather than a novelist. Maddening.

Stunning
I can't say this is an easy book to read and it took me some time to get into the style of writing. Basically many strands of Day's life are intertwined; past, present and future. This means you initially have to work to keep up and make sense of it. When I'd got that sorted I found the depth of the book and the writing breathtaking.
I admire books that encompass the human condition and this is certainly one of them.