Author: Anne Aylor
ISBN: 978-0-9566725-4-4
Format: Trade paperback, 164 pages, 216 x 138mm
Published: 21 February 2012
UK paperback RRP: £5.99, inclusive of P&P
Kindle edition: £1.95, available from Amazon UK or Amazon US
For most of us, there is one person we can never stop loving. For Elkie Bonner, a grocer’s daughter from Northern Ireland, it’s Ivan Packenham, the sophisticated son of a landowner in County Londonderry who’s home for a visit. In a drunken moment, he asks her to ‘run away’ with him to Swinging London. Once there, he neglects her. Her life is spent waiting for him, rewarded only with brief visits to her dingy bedsit.
After a disastrous holiday together in Normandy, he disappears from her life, sending her occasional postcards which arrive with no return address. Elkie struggles to forget him, takes lovers, becomes engaged. Then Ivan sends her another postcard, asking her to meet him at the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, the resort where he’d once abandoned her. Now that she’s finally stopped caring for him, can she risk seeing him again? If she goes, what will she say? How are you, Ivan? Can it really have been thirteen years? I’ve been frozen for so long.
Since No Angel Hotel‘s first publication in 1986 by HarperCollins and St Martin’s Press in 1987, the author has completely revised this plangent novel for BareBone Books. Rewritten and rewrapped, it is now available in a new edition designed by Line of Sight in Toronto.
Click a play button for a taster:
‘Anne Aylor’s first novel is a finely crafted and very moving exploration of the youthful pain and the lasting passion of love . . . Aylor’s sensitive writing is a quiet reflection on the fragility of human feelings that leaves us with a lump in the throat.’
—Washington Post Book World
‘With a spare elegance that lives up to her publisher’s comparison—with the romances of Jean Rhys—Aylor’s first novel presents a passionate, gloomy story of abandoned innocence and abused love.’
—Kirkus Reviews
‘Anne Aylor has produced a novel of spellbinding intensity… Written in brief, ephemeral passages as if a more prolonged focus would scorch the page, this is an exhilarating first novel.’
—Yorkshire Post
‘Sexually frank, and with a touch of the faux-naif, Anne Aylor has a good eye, especially for the telling detail which is all her own.’
—London Evening Standard
‘Anne Aylor has produced that literary rarity, a brilliant first novel.’
—Pittsburgh Press
‘Visual and atmospheric writing’
—The Guardian
‘All-consuming’
—Publisher’s Weekly
‘A tour de force of passion and longing’
—Denise Chávez, author of Loving Pedro Infante
‘A profound take on doomed, obsessive love. Pared-down prose, stripped of excess detail, which says far more than many wordy passages could ever do. With a few deft, economical pen-strokes the deepest emotion is impressively conveyed.’
—Wendy Perriam, author of Broken Places
Born in New Mexico, Anne Aylor has had short stories published by the Arts Council of Great Britain, The Literary Review, London Magazine, Fiction Magazine, Stand Magazine and broadcast on BBC Radio. Her second novel, The Double Happiness Company, was published by BareBone Books in 2011. In 2008 she was shortlisted for the 2008 Bridport Prize and the 2011 Fish Short Story Prize.
She is 90,010 words into her third book, The Speed of Dark, a novel about love, death and beekeeping and has started work on her fourth set in Spain at the time of the Civil War.
Nearly 20 years after it was first published, and acclaimed – and bizarrely lost – Elise Valmorbida’s debut novel Matilde Waltzing has been reincarnated. At BareBone Books we say thank God, or Saint Barbara of the Apparition, for the technological revolution.
Find this apparition at Amazon for your Kindle
After being translated into Korean, German and Serbian, this popular collection of ‘True stories about finding love’ has finally been translated into an ebook for the Amazon Kindle.
