LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
March 2007 Book of the Month
The Other Side of You explores the theme of redemption through love and art, which has become a hallmark of Salley Vickers's acclaimed work. As with her other highly popular novels including her hugely celebrated debut Miss Garnet’s Angel, this is a multi-layered and subtly audacious story, which traces the boundaries of life and death and the difficult possibilities of repentance. I think Sebastian Faulks was absolutely right when he said, of this novel, ‘Tremendously moving…this is a subtle and thoughtful novel and in the resolution there is anguish as well as calm’. It’s elegantly written and the prose floats effortlessly on every page. To read an interview with Salley Vickers about The Other Side of You , click here.
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The Other Side of You Synopsis
'There is no cure for being alive.' Thus speaks Dr David McBride, a psychiatrist for whom death exerts an unusual draw. As a young child he witnessed the death of his six-year-old brother and it is this traumatic event which has shaped his own personality and choice of profession. One day a failed suicide, Elizabeth Cruikshank, is admitted to his hospital. She is unusually reticent and it is not until he recalls a painting by Caravaggio that she finally yields up her story.
We learn of Elizabeth Cruikshank's dereliction of trust, and the man she has lost, through David's narration. As her story unfolds David finds his own life being touched by her account and a haunting sense that the 'other side' of his elusive patient has a strange resonance for him, too.
Set partly in Rome, The Other Side of You explores the theme of redemption through love and art, which has become a hallmark of Salley Vickers's acclaimed work. As with her other highly popular novels this is a many-layered and subtly audacious story, which traces the boundaries of life and death and the difficult possibilities of repentance.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780007165452 |
| Publication date: |
5th March 2007 |
| Author: |
Salley Vickers |
| Publisher: |
Harpercollins Publishers |
| Format: |
Paperback (b Format) |
| Pagination: |
320 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
Salley Vickers Press Reviews
There is something rare and special about Vickers as a novelist. In exploring the connections between faith and imagination, art and redemption, religion and science in an intelligent, unusual but very readable way, she manages to touch something buried deep in all of us. It gives her work a quietly compelling quality.’ Peter Stanford, Independent
‘Kindred spirits and soul mates are at the heart of Salley Vickers' new novel set in a South Coast psychiatric institution and in Rome…This is a fine and multi-layered novel which suggests that suffering is necessary and that opportunities for happiness should be taken whenever offered.’ Daily Mail
‘The lives of the characters in this gently absorbing novel continue to resonate with the failures, possibilities, regrets and redemptions – consoled and mirrored by art – that we all endure.’ Carol Ann Duffy, Telegraph
Author
About Salley Vickers
Salley Vickers is the author of the word-of-mouth bestseller Miss Garnet's Angel and several other bestselling novels including Mr Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Dancing Backwards as well as a collection of short stories Aphrodite's Hat. She has worked as a cleaner, a dancer, a university teacher of literature and a psychoanalyst. She is currently a RLF fellow at Newnham College Cambridge and she divides her time between Cambridge and London.
Her first name, Salley (about which she is often asked, and which can cause problems on computer searches for her books), is spelled with an ‘e’ because it is the Irish for ‘willow’ (from the Latin: salix, salicis) as in the W. B. Yeats poem, ‘Down by the salley gardens’.
More About Salley Vickers
