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Dancing Backwards

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Dancing Backwards

By: Salley Vickers
Narrated by: Jilly Bond
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About this listen

The brilliant new work from the bestselling author of ‘Miss Garnet’s Angel’ and ‘The Other Side of You’.

Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise ship 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 travelling with her, who affect her understanding of her own past. Most significantly, she meets Dino, the dance 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 which characterise Salley Vickers' acclaimed work. This bittersweet novel is subtle, poignant and wonderfully entertaining.

©2009 HarperCollins Publishers; (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers Absurdist Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Tear-jerking

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All stars
Most relevant
Not read anything quite like it before. It’s an easy read, very light and quite enjoyable.

Easy read, enjoyable

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Salley Vickers is a good and subtle writer and this is a lovely novel with lots of depth as such I cannot think why the narrator has presented it as a cheesy comic turn. It's very difficult to like any of the characters as presented and the flippant twang of poet Violet's intonation is the least credible and most irritating of all. I only finished by determinedly filtering out the performance and focusing on the words, it's difficult though as the character 'voice' and narrator 'voice' slip around. I found myself wondering whether the audio editor at Harper Audio listened to this before releasing it. I really hope an alternative reading may be released at some point that will do this lovely novel justice. I regret not buying book instead.

A good book spoiled by obtrusive narration

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