Product Description

The long-awaited new novel from Salley Vickers, bestselling and much-loved author of Miss Garnet's Angel and The Other Side of You. Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise ship to New York to visit Edwin, an old friend. As she makes the six day crossing, she relives the traumatic events that led to her losing Edwin's friendship, and abandoning her career as a poet, for the safety of marriage and domesticity. Despite her natural reserve, she meets a rich variety of passengers travelling with her, who affect her understanding of her own past. Most significantly, she meets Dino, the dance host, whose motives in befriending Vi are shady, but who teaches her to ballroom dance - and inadvertently helps her to recover from her past. Moving between the late sixties and the present day, Dancing Backwards is written with the lightness of touch and psychological insight which characterise Salley Vickers' acclaimed work. This bittersweet novel is subtle, poignant and wonderfully entertaining.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8023 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover

Washington Post
`If you enjoy the work of Marilynne Robinson, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Salter or Anita Brookner, you should be reading Vickers.'

Philip Pullman
`Salley Vickers [is] a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.'

Philip Pullman
`Salley Vickers [is] a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.'

Customer Reviews

Another Vickers Classic - sharp, witty and a terrific read
This is a brilliantly written story of Violet (Vi) Hetherington and a serious life error she made as a young woman, which is recalled as she crosses the ocean to visit the friend she betrayed. The novel unfolds in characteristic Vickers' style - spare, dry, acutely observed and often very funny,as well as poignant and frequently painful. The back story takes place in the sixties, when as a shy young student, convinced of her own insignificance, Vi meets Edwin, her teacher of literature who encourages her to write and they become firm friends. But another friend of Edwin arrives, a serpent in this garden of Eden, and the resulting catastrophe causes Vi to leave her life as a sucessful poet and settle for a safe but drab marriage. We feel both for the young, inexperienced Vi and her older, more melancholy self, whose shrewd eye appraises her fellow passengers but who also becomes, if unwillingly at first, engaged in their lives. Oh, and she learns to dance, which she is surprisingly good at, which leads to another plot theme. What is so enjoyable about this, as with all Vickers's novels, is that her acute observations and insights are never at the expense of her characters, or her readers. She has a wise and compassionate view of humanity, as befits her psychological background, but she is also huge fun. A great book to take on holiday as well as a serious novel.

SALLEY VICKERS AT HER BEST
I am sure that readers who loved Salley Vickers' marvellous first novel MISS GARNET'S ANGEL will, as I did, relish this deceptively entertaining new book. A novel that is such an easy pleasure to read, yet has such wit and wisdom distilled into it, is a rarity and I think only the late Penelope Fitzgerald managed it as seemingly effortlesly as Salley Vickers. This is a book about roads not taken, lives not lived and how it is never too late to hope or to change. It is profoundly moving and ultimately joyous. It also makes one realize how very very hard it is to find time, in the ordinary run of things, to meditate on one's life and maybe that is the advantage of an ocean cruise (the setting for the book). One is literally set adrift. Here it works as a perfect crucible for the protagonist's understanding of how she made such self-destructive choices. It is a book that continues to resonate long after
it is finished.

Stunning
This is a stunning novel; beautifully written, wise and immensely entertaining. This may be Salley Vickers' best yet. Of her previous novels Dancing Backwards perhaps has most in common with Miss Garnet's Angel, and like that novel has as its protagonist a woman of a certain age at a crossroads in her life. As in all Vickers' novels something happens that is transfiguring and enlarging. What more can we ask of a work of art?