THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL 2019 marked the centenary of Stanley Middleton's birth. Holiday, winner of the 1974 Booker Prize, remains the most celebrated and popular novel from 'the Chekhov of suburbia'. Edwin Fisher has fled to a seaside resort of his childhood past to try to come to terms with the death of his baby son and the collapse of his marriage to Meg. On this strange and lonely holiday, as he seeks to understand what went wrong, Edwin must find somea way to think about what he has been and decide upon where he can go next. ______________________________________ 'At first glance, or even at second, Stanley Middleton's world is easily recognizable... The excellence of art, for Middleton, is an exact vision of real things as they are. And because he is himself so exact an observer, his world at third glance can seem strange and disturbing or newly and brilliantly lit with colour.' A.S. Byatt 'We need Stanley Middleton to remind us what the novel is about. Holiday is vintage Middleton... One has to look at nineteenth-century writing for comparable storytelling.' Sunday Times

Thomas Harris is a school teacher and composer on the verge of great success, but he resents his dependence on local 'big-wigs'. He writes a brass band march as well as a requiem for his miner father while contemplating an affair with the married Nance Brand, librettist and CND activist.