- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (2 Jan 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099422441
- ISBN-13: 978-0099422440
- Product Dimensions: 13 x 1.9 x 19.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 749,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Sarah May's first novel, The Nudist Colony, won her huge plaudits. With not a sign of that incapacitating blight--second-novel jitters--she's written another wonder in Spanish City. Distinguished by daring invention and large-heartedness in her plotting and characterisation, she turns her tale of lost hopes, loves, expectations, into a work of immense readability. Glancing actions and unexpected exchanges, often just off centre or out of reach, reverberate like seismic shifts.
It's circa-1960s Setton, a seedy North Sea town that's seen better days: its pleasure palace, Spanish City, is boarded up, its roller coaster rusting. Only the ice-cream parlour, Moscadini's, at the other end of town, struggles on. Hal Price lives in the same house he's been in all his life; he teaches in the same school that staunched his early ambitions ("What do you think you are, Price? A free man?" ... "He knew that after this he would start every day of his life, not with breakfast, but with this conversation between Fitts and himself.") So joining up and being shipped off to Normandy--to "Rat Castle"--at war's end had seemed the only thing to do. There he'd met Stella, who'd emerged from the sea like Aphrodite and who, Hal realised, "had no regard for tragedy and no intention of ever understanding it". What she does understand is what Hal can't quite achieve: "you need to lose your sense of gravity ... exchange real time for air time ... Sensation can be pure, Hal." Now he's almost resigned to playing the cat each year in the Christmas pantomime. But after this year's panto he's kidnapped by two young brothers, Victor and Will, and taken to Moscadini's where his past takes hold--especially his sense of the elusive Stella. She had been spirited away from "Rat Castle" by Major Delavel, Setton's reclusive toff, but had abandoned him only to turn up, years later, in Setton to tell Hal: "I didn't come here because of Spanish City. I came here so that you could find me." Spanish City, permeated by the intoxication of lost and found, found and lost, lingers hauntingly with suggestive mystery. --Ruth Petrie
- Spanish City is joint winner of the 2001 Amazon.co.uk Writers' Bursaries
Review
"Sarah May's first novel, The Nudist Colony, was highly acclaimed: 'Quite simply the best book I have read in years, and, for a debut novel, quite incredible.' Time Out.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a great tale. It begins in Setton, a run down seaside resort in the north east which has its own version of the Spanish City and the Charleston roller coaster (the original is on the Salt Lake in Utah), with the kidnapping of a local school teacher, Hal Price, by Victor and Will. The story has its roots in wartime France and a pantomime at Rat Castle. Hal is playing Dick Whittington's cat on that occasion, in Stella's absence, and is again acting the part of the cat when he is kidnapped. This is a very clever book with its twists and turns, especially as the threads are drawn together gradually as the story draws to its close. The characters are very strongly drawn, especially Raymond the undertaker, cousin of Hal and ever present in his life. Once started I was gripped and struggled to put this down.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a great tale. It begins in Setton, a run down seaside resort in the north east which has its own version of the Spanish City and the Charleston roller coaster (the original is on the Salt Lake in Utah), with the kidnapping of a local school teacher, Hal Price, by Victor and Will. The story has its roots in wartime France and a pantomime at Rat Castle. Hal is playing Dick Whittington's cat on that occasion, in Stella's absence, and is again acting the part of the cat when he is kidnapped. This is a very clever book with its twists and turns, especially as the threads are drawn together gradually as the story draws to its close. The characters are very strongly drawn, especially Raymond the undertaker, cousin of Hal and ever present in his life. Once started I was gripped and struggled to put this down.
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