Product Description

Miyuki Woodward; lover of pints and instant food has been taking a holiday to the same seaside town for eight years. She is made to feel at home, at least during pub-quiz nights, when Short Mr Hughes, Tall Mr Hughes and Mr Puw are especially glad to recruit Miyuki and her trivia prowess to their team. This year, following an act of raw creativity involving some cans of gold spraypaint, Miyuki will take part in the most turbulent events the village has seen since Tall Mr Hughes returned from the pub toilet without remembering to button up.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #271823 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 198 pages

Review
"Rhodes's fans already know about his skill with character, his brilliant sense of humour and ability to pull the rug from under the reader at just the right moment, but Gold is an even more emotionally powerful read than anything he's written before. This tale of a Japanese woman struggling to find her place in a small Welsh community is Rhodes at his very best, and that's as good as it gets." Matt Thorne "Very clever and very funny, Gold goes straight to the heart. Dan Rhodes is a true original; with a fresh, funny, quirky style that seems to owe nothing to other writers, and everything to his own powers of invention." Hilary Mantel"

Jenny Colgan
"Whilst remaining as funny and original as ever, Gold is maybe
Rhodes' most adult, moving book yet. Unforgettable."

Alan Carr, Friday Night Project
"Wonderfully unpredictable. Draws you in from the very first page.
I couldn't put it down."

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, tender and really funny
Miyuki Woodward spends two weeks of each year away from her lover, Grindl, in a sleepy seaside village in Wales. She spends her time reading, walking, stuffing her face with macaroni cheese and frazzles. She also drinks in the local pub with short Mr Hughes, tall Mr Hughes, Mr Puw and Septic Barry.

The village is a place where much stays the same, but Miyuki feels a compulsion to do something creative with seven tins of gold paint, and this will have repercussions.

'Gold' is a character driven novel, but Rhodes' attention to detail and perfect obeservations make this a sheer joy. The book is in turns funny, tender, painful and beautiful. I really did laugh out loud reading about the pub landlord who reads that being deliberately rude to customers will attract a cult following of new customers.

This book was an unexpected pleasure. Highly recommended.

Don't try to paint the sunset
"Gold" tells the story of Miyuke, a Welsh-Japanese junk food addict who spends her annual holiday away from her much-loved partner in Pembrokeshire among a bunch of mainly elderly pub bores. It might look like a beguilingly slow, comic read, but though the comedy is real it masks a serious purpose. It's about not trying to prolong moments - carpe diem, if you like, but having plucked it, don't try to make it last, because it isn't meant to. Miyuke's attempt to prolong the transient gold of a beach sunset by literally gilding the rocks is emblematic of this theme. Very readable, and in the end quite sad, as many of Rhodes' are, but the end is justified and feels right. And don't fall into the common error of English critics, ie thinking that comedy can't be profound and "serious" writers should avoid it. Most of them do avoid it, but only because it's so much harder than tragedy.

Short but packing a punch
This started okay for me and I didn't expect to give it more than 3 stars to be honest. However, the second half of the book was much improved and we got to know the characters a bit more. Every year, for two weeks, Miyuki leaves her lover Grindl at home and visits the same seaside village. The locals know who she is but nothing about her. This year she decides to do something different which starts a chain of events that seem to change Miyuki.

An ambiguous ending (or so I thought) leaves you to wonder a lot. This really works in this case. The characters are so stereotypical of a local pub, it's fabulous. The novel is driven by the characters rather than the plot and I can why it was a little slow to begin with as they need to be drawn out for the reader to understand. A good short novel. One worth reading but not necessarily one that would make me seek out his other work.