He had bought a small plot of ground a few miles from where they lived and he had just erected on it two glass-houses in which he proposed to cultivate tomatoes for profit. He had come back one evening and asked her if she’d ever noticed tomatoes in the shops. ‘A full chip when you go by in the morning,’ he’d said, ‘and an empty one when you come home at night.’ The plot of land had been paid for out of capital left to her by her father, as had the shed he had built in the garden and the concreting in the yard. Earlier in her marriage to Mr Gregan she had once or twice protested at his way of appropriating her money, but he had pointed out that it was essential to invest money in a sensible manner rather than to purchase clothes with it, or household luxuries that would wear out quickly. He had a way of speaking about such matters over a period of several weeks, making his point after tea every evening when they sat down by the fire. ‘A garment can let you down,’ he would say. ‘A fur coat taken off the back of some misfortunate animal could be eaten by our friend Master Moth and then where’d you be? Or you’d have it stolen off your arm by some brigand when you were out walking in the Botanic Gardens. You’d be paying out good money on insurance with an expensive garment, whereas a concreted yard requires no insurance whatsoever. Once it’s down it’s in place for ever. A concreted yard is an improvement to any property.’ He would go on until it was time for the News and when the News was over he would continue. She might ask him if he’d mind not sitting by the fire in his socks in case anyone came to the door, but he usually didn’t hear when she referred to his personal habits. He never appeared to notice her anger, or her sarcasm. He went his way, but somehow she found it difficult to go hers.

O’Neil’s Hotel in Dublin has seen better days. Now there is still O’Shea, the hall porter, attended by his faithful greyhound, but he is the only remaining member of staff. The hotel’s ninety-one year old owner, Mrs Sinnott lives in an upper room, sitting by the window year after year in absolute silence. An assortment of part-time prostitutes, their pimp and various relatives and neighbours use the place for one purpose or another, each of them big on self-deception and hopelessness, but there are never any real guests.

The hotel is a closed community, a fictional window on the world, and William Trevor shows us enough of its inhabitants for us to want more, and we are privy to their failings as well as their victories, their vulnerabilities as well as their strengths.

By chance, Mrs Eckdorf, a twice divorced middle-aged woman, a photographer of sorts, hears of O’Neill’s and decides to visit. We then become witnesses as Mrs Eckdorf’s own personality disintegrates and she simultaneously internalizes and fictionalizes the inhabitants of the hotel.

This novel is a bleak statement on the human condition, concerned as it is with an alienating and alienated society. I was reminded on more than one occasion of the work of William Faulkner, and particularly of Joyce’s Dubliners.

William Trevor is a rare and skillful writer. He manages to leave you with the impression that you’ve seen and come to know, not only Dublin, or the whole of Ireland, but that you’ve met and seen the workings of humanity itself.

Grace was over-weight and all her parts were subject to more than a fair share of gravity. There had been an attempt to dye her hair, but the scalp was ever-visible beneath it. A suite of bags had formed a colony under her eyes and her arms hung like broken branches from her shoulders. She had not attended to herself since waking that morning, or for a longer period before that. Like Margaret, she was well-shod, in shoes that did not look English, perhaps German or Italian, also in leather with tiny studs in the soles, laced-up flatties.

The walls of the waiting room were festooned with notices and charts showing how simple exercises could keep a body active and alive.

“How’s Marjorie,” Grace asked.

“She’s OK,” Margaret said. “She keeps going, but it’s not easy for her.”

“Once she married him,” Grace said, “it was never going to be a walk in the park. What’s the daughter called?”

“Celia. She’s living with a man, used to be married to someone else and his wife and kids live in the same street, few doors away. Marjorie says there’s days he comes home from work and walks right past Celia’s door and goes to his old house. And Celia, she gets upset but she makes excuses for him, says he’s tired after a days work, not thinking.”

“Not capable of thinking, more like. Sounds like that.”

“And Celia, she suffers from vaginal dryness, has to use a gel made from kiwi fruit, extract of kiwi fruit. Marjorie says it makes life possible but she’s still dry, you know what I mean? Creamy but dry.”

“I can’t stand them,” Grace said. “Kiwi fruit. All those black seeds, get lodged under your teeth.” She moved her feet to allow a man with a belly to squeeze past. “Give me a banana any day.”

Margaret let it drift for a moment before saying. “I love fruit. It’s my favourite.”

And the son?” Grace asked. “Is he married? Or living with someone?”

“Oh, no,” Margaret said. “He’s the other way. Might have a partner, I suppose. Though Marjorie’s never mentioned it.”

Grace shook her head. “That whole family,” she said, “it’s only held together by a piece of string.”

Proposed cover image for the audio version of Winged with Death

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The full cover will look something like this: Winged with Death Cover.

Unabridged audiobook by Isis Audio Books, read by Michael Tudor Barnes, who, after reading Classics at London University, trained at RADA and for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He also worked with the RSC, played leading roles both home and abroad and has over 600 radio broadcasts to his credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly and he played Willy Roper in EastEnders.

Publication details when available.

He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.

“. . . Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody out.”

When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read Wilder John C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.

“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the corridor. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and walk.”

And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straightjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.

There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab – either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon – and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.

Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions – Look: where’s my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone: What’s the deal here? – but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.”

And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.

John Wilder is going on forty with a successful career in sales and a stable family; and he’s increasingly irrational, paranoid, and monstrously self-obsessed.

Yates, who is remembered for writing about the mundane sadness of domestic life in a flat emotionless prose, tackles new territory here, and the result is probably the weakest of his novels.

The novel is disappointing but not without its peaks, and Yates reminds us from time to time that he speaks “for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance.”

He concentrates on alcoholism and insanity in this unrelentingly realist novel, but I could only empathize with the main character in flashes and was left wondering if the story would have been better narrated through the eyes of John Wilder’s wife. Yates gives her the first and last chapters, but she has little to do with the main part of the narrative, which leaves us trapped in the disintegrating mind of her husband.

I was quite unprepared for the bizarre practices that persist in the selling of a book. Apparently, I must set a price for our books (that must end with 99p, obviously) and then offer a whacking discount to the trade. They then order a couple of hundred copies, hide them at the back of the shop for six months, sell two and send the rest back to me. This is regarded as so commonplace that no-one bats an eyelid, and the returned books are pulped and form the hardcore of motorways. Tell this to an ordinary reader in a Waterstone’s Costa outlet, and they will be utterly amazed. I was too, and also entirely out of pocket.

Helen Miles is the proprietor of Solidus, a small, independent, Stroud-based publishing house using print on demand technology to get up-and-coming writers into print.

1st March 1998
The other night at dinner, Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed. I had heard most of it before, of course, there being few aspects of the Connolly business that Sheba has not described to me several times over. But this time round, something new came up. I happened to ask her if anything about the first embrace had surprised her. She laughed. Yes, the smell of the whole thing had been surprising, she said. She hadn’t anticipated his personal odour and if she had, she would probably have guessed at something teenagey: bubble gum, cola, feet.

When the moment arrived, what I actually inhaled was soap, tumble-dried laundry. He smelled of scrupulous self-maintenance. You know the washing machine fug that envelopes you sometimes, walking past the basement vents of mansion flats? Like that. So clean, Barbara. Never any of that cheese and onion breath that the other kids have.

Sheba, married and with children of her own, is obsessed with a young boy, one of her pupils. Barbara, a teacher at the same school, is single and lonely. Zoë Heller brings them together in this rather compelling novel of middle-class angst and personal insight. Two women who, each in her own way, are in deep denial and seem incapable of facing the truth of their lives.

As the novel progresses, the initial narrative of middle-aged femme fatale and grubby fifteen-year-old schoolboy is eclipsed by the realization that Barbara, our seemingly disinterested narrator, is in fact a predator herself, probably of a more dangerous hue than her colleague.

I enjoyed the novel and certainly found it compelling. But the writing is uneven, often transparent in quality, it occasionally disintegrates into a kind of self-conscious journalese. Nevertheless, the underlying power of the theme is maintained, and I find myself musing on these characters long after finishing the book.

The lawyer woman’s leg was trapped under a huge rectangular stone. I spoke to her briefly but she was slipping in and out of consciousness and obviously in pain. I used my scarf to put a tourniquet around her thigh, reasoning that she must be losing arterial blood from the crushed leg.

Seemed to me she was dying right in front of our eyes and I’d have to do something quickly if we were to save her. I said ding, dong, dang up at the sky, which is as close as I get to swearing. Ain’t nothing about bells, anyway.

I told Billy to radio for assistance while I ran to the outbuildings and found a tractor. Having been raised on a farm I knew exactly what I needed to do the job. With the help of one of the labourers I attached the digger and a small bucket and drove the tractor back to the site of the accident.

By this time Billy had finished on the radio and was trying to comfort the lawyer woman by placing something soft beneath her head. She made small sounds but appeared to be unaware of her surroundings or herself.

I stabilized the tractor and got myself settled at the controls. I maneuvered the leading edge of the bucket beneath the stone and began lifting it, ratcheting up and away from the woman.

When it stood at around forty-five degrees I made sure that the bucket and the arm of the digger held its weight, then got down from the tractor and together with Billy, moved in to lift the woman clear.

Before we reached her there was a movement as the huge stone seemed to slip under the bucket. I don’t know how it did that. Seemed like a very long moment as I looked up at it, knowing that the thing was going to come crashing down on the very spot we occupied.

It was Billy who grabbed me and threw me clear, and he somehow had time to get clear himself.

But when the dust settled the lawyer woman was nowhere to be seen. The stone had fallen further over to the left than its previous position, and buried her. Crushed her and buried her. Took me a little while to digest that information. My mind wouldn’t entertain the possibility for several moments.

I was on my knees looking up at the sky and I said, “fuck,” must’ve said it five or six times, like that one word was all the language I had left.

All characters in this publication are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

And it’s nearly always a lie. Robert Liddell suggests that the passage deceives nobody and would be no protection in a libel action, and, he continues, one must suppose that the common explanation is the true one: ‘it is inserted by publishers so that illiterate booksellers’ assistants may more easily be able to distinguish fiction from biography, memoirs and the like.’

To muddy the waters even further, in recent years some people have declared that they are willing to pay to be written into this or that popular writers’ novels. And some writers have agreed to do this, accepting money for their favourite charity as payment. It seems that some among us are not satisfied by having both a ‘real’ life and a virtual life on the world-wide-web, but are thirsty for more and looking for further identity in some kind of fictional existence.

I suppose these people must recognize that life and art are quite different things, and that existence in one is strangely different to existence in the other? E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel, points out how free fictional characters are from work, and what a disproportionate amount of time they devote to love.

I can’t help recalling the words of Guy de Maupassant, when talking about fictional character:

. . . whether we are describing a king, an assasin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stall-holder in the market, it is always ourselves that we are describing, for we are obliged to ask ourselves the following question: ‘If I was a king, an assassin, a thief, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, a stall-holder, what would I do, what would I think, how would I behave.’