The Eyrie - Hardcover

Davies, Stevie

3.62

24 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297851411 ISBN 13: 9780297851417

Publisher: Orion Publishing, 2007

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Nobody at The Eyrie is quite like Red Dora - in her eighties, she's a Scots ex-Communist, ex-Trotskyite who fought in the Spanish Civil War. With her fiery brand of radical anticapitalism, she conjures plans of political sabotage and computer hacking. She rails at a society that seems to have forgotten its political roots and a government that doesn't care. But beneath her rage lies a more intimate disappointment, a tragic death she has yet to come to terms with. Eirlys is a madly patriotic Welsh woman with a brass dragon on her door. She is the "mother" of the The Eyrie's little clan - always providing tea and sympathy. Little do the other residents suspect that Eirlys was once in prison. Hannah comes to The Eyrie to escape years of boredom in a dreary middle-class marriage to a man she never loved. Reveling in her new found freedom, she finds that life at The Eyrie offers surprising new opportunities and an unlikely co-conspirator in Red Dora.

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About the Author:

Stevie Davies is a novelist, literary critic, biographer, and historian. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her novel, The Element of Water. Her first novel, Boy Blue, won the Fawcett Society Book Prize in 1987, and her work has also been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Review:

"Davies just writes, very precisely, sometimes wonderfully... she does what a writer does - making beauty for strangers, passing it on." –Al Kennedy, The Guardian

"Davies has a tantalizing way of writing glancingly about the important developments, leaving the reader eager to know what happened." –Nicolette Jones, The Independent

"...it is deeply joyful, and magically written, as full of sea swell as of rasping barnacles." —Murrough O'Brien, The Independent on Sunday

"If you've never read one of Davies's novels, make this the first and we guarantee it won't be the last." —Shauna Bartlett, Glamour Magazine

"Making politics a central feature of a novel that isn�t primarily about a political situation (as a war novel, for example, might be) is a tricky thing to pull off, and it happens so rarely that it is wonderful to see it here, but Davies is expert enough at creating believable characters to avoid making clunky assumptions about conflict or the impact it has. And those characters are both memorable as well as believable." —Amy Mathieson, The Scotsman

"Davies deals sensitively but unsentimentally with lives less ordinary than they seem, writing with warmth and wit, with and against the currents of modern living." —Saga

"In The Eyrie, Davies writes beautifully, compassionately and has a fine perspective of geographical and social history." —Gwyn Griffiths, The Morning Star

"Davies's novel exhibits an agile wit, an intuitive understanding of human nature and an unstentimental clarity in its personification of the political." —Trevor Lewis, The Sunday Times

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