<div>Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise 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 traveling with her, who affect her understanding of her own past. Most significant, she meets Dino, the dancing 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 that characterize Salley Vickers's acclaimed work. This bittersweet novel is subtle, poignant, and wonderfully entertaining.</div>

Dancing Backwards

<div>&ldquo;Vickers has turned a thwarted romance in to a serious page-turner.&rdquo; &mdash;Time Out For psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. David McBride, death exerts an unusual draw. Despite his profession, he has never come to terms with the violent accident that took his brother&#39;s life, a trauma that has shaped his life. But when a failed suicide, Elizabeth Cruikshank, comes into his care, he finds the deepest reaches of his suppressed history being reactivated. Elizabeth is mysteriously reticent about her own past and it is not until David recalls a painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio that she finally yields her story. As she recounts the chance encounter which took her to Rome, and her tragic tale of passion and betrayal, David begins to find a strange and disturbing reflection of his own loss in the haunted &ldquo;other side&rdquo; of this elusive woman. In distinctive, graceful prose, Salley Vickers explores the ways both love and art can penetrate the complexities of the human heart, to invade and change our being, and the possibilities of regeneration through another&#39;s vision and understanding. &ldquo;[A] hypnotic chronicle of quiet desperation . . . .Vickers . . . delivers wrenching conflicts of love within and outside of marriage.&rdquo; &mdash;Publishers Weekly &ldquo;[A] moving, utterly engrossing novel.&rdquo; &mdash;The Guardian &ldquo;If you enjoy the work of Marilynne Robinson, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Salter or Anita Brookner, you should be reading Vickers. All these authors reflect, with grace and gravity, on life&#39;s moments of sorrowful epiphany.&rdquo; &ndash; Michael Dirda, Washington Post</div>

The Other Side of You

<div>1. holiday: a period in which a break is taken from work or studies for rest, travel, or recreation. [literally: holy day] Many years ago, Mr. Golightly wrote a work of dramatic fiction that grew to be an astonishing international bestseller. But his reputation is on the decline and he finds himself badly out of touch with the modern world. He decides to take a holiday and comes to the historic village of Great Calne, hoping to use the opportunity to bring his great work up to date. But he soon finds that events take over his plans and that the themes he has written on are being strangely replicated in the lives of the villagers around him. As he comes to know his neighbors better, Mr. Golightly begins to examine his attitude toward love and to ponder the terrible catastrophe of his only son's death. And we begin to learn the true, and extraordinary, identity of Mr. Golightly and the nature of the secret sorrow that haunts him and links him to his new friends. Mysterious, light of touch, witty, and profound, Mr Golightly's Holiday confirms Salley Vickers's reputation as a writer of "fiction that entertains even as it considers serious questions of sin and redemption, love and loss" (Francine Prose, People).</div>

Mr Golightly's Holiday

<div>When a man dies and leaves behind a wife and a mistress, we expect certain responses to follow. But as the narrator of Salley Vickers's second novel explains, "this is not an account of feminine jealousy, or even revenge, and not all human beings (not even women) conform to the attitudes generally expected." Indeed, in this ironic and witty novel nothing is quite as we expect to find it. Telling the story of Bridget Hansome and Frances Slater, Vickers brings to life a loving marriage and a love affair that exist side by side for years - and continue to reverberate after secretive, generous, sexually prodigal Peter Hansome dies suddenly in a car accident, on his way home from an assignation with yet another lover, about whom neither woman knows. While Frances, a London art dealer and sometime artists' model, gradually makes friends with the older, Shakespeare-loving Bridget, these two unconventional women start to learn the whole truth (or almost the whole truth) about the man whose death brought them together and whose ghost watches over them still. Wise, wry, and intellectually playful, Instances of the Number 3 explores the mysterious power of triangles in love, art, and theology. It confirms Salley Vickers as one of the most intelligent new voices in British fiction.</div>

Salley Vickers
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Books By Salley Vickers (4 Books)

Dancing Backwards

The Other Side of You

Mr Golightly's Holiday

Instances of the Number 3

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