Product Description

Opening at the Hay Festival, and ending with the prospect of a spring wedding, Sue Gee's novel is a lively story of tangled relationships and the sustaining powers of good books, loyal friends and conversation.

Friends since university, with busy working lives behind them, Dido and Georgia have long been looking forward to carefree days of books and conversation, when each finds herself caught up in unexpected domestic drama. Dido, for the first time, has cause to question her marriage; widowed Georgia feels certain her husband will return to her. Meanwhile, an eccentric country cousin goes wildly off the rails, children are unhappy in love, and perfect health is all at once in question.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116927 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Elizabeth Buchan, The Sunday Times
'Sue Gee's many fans will fall on READING IN BED... Giving great
vividness to their inner lives, Gee unerringly and confidently evokes her
characters'

Review

‘as seductively readable as its title suggests...draws the reader in with its skilful portrayal of real-life situations’

Eve magazine
'A heartwarming read'

Customer Reviews

Contemporary women's fiction at its best
This is the story of Dido and Georgia, friends since they met at college. They even married chaps who were also friends at college and, since then, have shared so many things, holidays, family events and most of all, a shared love of literature. Indeed, the book opens with Dido and Georgia leaving the Hay on Wye Literary Festival, each returning home, Dido to York and Henry and Georgia to London and, since widowhood the previous year, an empty house. And all the while, literature creeps into the narrative, from Katharine Whitehorn's Cooking in a Bedsitter to the Russian writers, in particular The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.
As the story unfolds, we meet Chloe, Georgia's daughter who is longing to find someone who will love her, and Mad Maud, Henry's elderly cousin, sliding into dementia and living on her Sussex farm which, whilst the narrator likens it to the Larkins' farm in The Darling Buds of May, has more than a passing resemblance to Cold Comfort Farm. And then, in Yorkshire, Dido and Jeffrey have their own formidable problems to overcome.
Some readers mightn't care for the without-quotation-marks speech, where a single dash indicates speech; others, and I include myself here, will find it refreshing.
If this novel were a meal, it would be a sustaining casserole, not a quick fix pot noodle. It is rich and satisfying, and a story which will remain with me for a very long time.

Bedtime book
This wasn't the lighthearted read that I was expecting but Gee's writing pulled me into the lives of the characters and held me there. This is a book about life and death, bereavement, romance and of course, books. Whenever it showed signs of getting a little dark for me, Gee turned it around and lightened it up with her gentle humour. The opening pages take part in Hay on Wye, which is a Mecca for serious book lovers and immediately I was hooked. In this book we meet several characters and families whose lives are all in some way enriched by literature. Gee writes with a great sense of compassion and observation making this book a comforting read - in fact, it would make an ideal bedtime book.

Gone a bit chick-lit
... and it's not only the cover. Sue Gee's great gift is to hook her readers and keep them engrossed, but to my mind this doesn't match THE HOURS OF THE NIGHT, her masterpiece.

Unlike that novel, with its wonderfully evoked rural setting, this all feels a bit smugly middle-class and monocultural. Everyone's got a Problem, and this results in some irritating viewpoint-hopping - for example a brief one-off excursion into the head of Paula, Dido's aloof daughter-in-law. The outcomes of Chloe's relationships - disastrous and then successful - are clearly signalled from afar.

Also, there are some annoying new mannerisms - too liberal a sprinkling of brackets, frequent invitations to the reader to guess who made a particular remark, and even direct author interventions: 'I'm crying now, just writing about it.' Worse - especially with literate and literary women as her viewpoint characters - Sue Gee uses far too many cliches for a writer of her calibre: "good as gold", "dead as a doornail", "sobbed her heart out", all in the first chapter.

Having said all this, I was engrossed, and it did indeed keep me reading in bed far past the time when I should have got up. But if this were the first I'd read of Sue Gee, I'm not sure I'd go on to the others.

THE HOURS OF THE NIGHT is a fine novel, and one I'd recommend to anyone. This one seems intent on categorising itself as lightweight women's fiction. I hope Sue Gee will return to form with her next novel - and yes, I shall read it.