| The Widow's Tale |  | Author: Mick Jackson
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
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Rating:  reviews
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0571206239
EAN: 9780571206230
Publication Date: April 1, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A newly-widowed woman has done a runner. She just jumped in her car, abandoned her house in north London and kept on driving until she reached the Norfolk coast. Now she's rented a tiny cottage and holed herself away there, if only to escape the insincere concern. She's not quite sure, but thinks she may be having a bit of a breakdown.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Very readable ... August 21, 2010
Cee-Gee (Northants, UK)
For a novel about a really difficult time in someone's life, this was really amusing and very readable.
She is a widow. One night, she runs out of her fancy London home, gets in her car and drives. She ends up renting a cottage in a coastal village and tries to come to terms with her new situation.
The novel is like her diary. Her own commentary on her widowhood. The humour is cutting as she describes her relationship with her late husband, her new life and the ways that she is almost deranged. This is what makes the novel so good. All the way through, you are wondering whether she is going to stay in the cottage forever, or whether she will ever feel comfortable enough to go back home.
I loved it, definitely recommended.
Gentle but witty read August 13, 2010
auntynellie
I absolutely loved this book - I loved the fact that nothing much happens, it made it so much more natural and human. They myriad of emotions the narrator goes through after the sudden death of her husband of 40 years were perfectly written; I particularly liked her obsessive stalking of the wrong person and her slow realisation that even though her late husband drove her to distraction, that he was truly the love of her life. It reminded me a bit of an Alan Bennet monologue - only lighter. A gentle but funny read - highly recommended.
Not what I expected! July 4, 2010
Rob Zeppelin (Belfast, N.Ireland)
This was not as quirky as the other books I've read by Mick Jackson, like the wonderful "Underground Man" and "Ten Sorry tales", as it was much more personal. Yet the plot still sucked me in and didn't let me out, until I was sure that not only did I really know it's main character well, but if questioned I could probably give a real name to her/him/ .......!
A wonderful read.
A slow burner - too slow for me June 29, 2010
Tealady2000 (Edinburgh)
Perhaps you need to have experienced the loss of a spouse to properly appreciate this novel. It's about a recently widowed woman who escapes to Norfolk to deal with her grief. It's written like a series of diary entries and we gradually learn more about the woman's life and the reason she fled to this particular location. The characterisation is good but the story unfolds very slowly and the writing style is very understated, so this book never truly gripped me.
Mick Jackson - A bitter-sweet tale of loss and the perils of white wine. June 26, 2010
Red on Black (Cardiff)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The dust jacket of this book points you to the previous works of Mick Jackson and the "astonishing" booker prize nominated "The Underground Man". In honesty I have had no previous acquaintance with the works of Mr Jackson but after reading "The Widows Tale" I have purchased his previous book because on this form it will be corker. "The Widows Tale" is a simple story about the terrible complexity of loss, grief, anger, distress, recollection and reconciliation. It concerns a feisty 63 year old widow who has decamped to East Anglia and the chills of a wintry Norfolk coast partly in a haze of regret and partly with a purpose. Jackson tells her story with considerable warmth and captures her anger with the right level of ferociousness. Along the way he produces a range of acute observations in a short book that can be read in one sitting. As stated there is nothing about grief that is not complex and Jackson wades into his subject matter with real skill, dexterity and depth. His characters comments are wryly observed. Thus he highlights the predicament of all families who at the moment of their sharpest loss have to "keep an eye on the catering" at the funeral, about the comfort that her dead husband remaining in her house separated by an "Half an inch of timber" gives her, and how the "cut off points" she has mentally set herself to "get over" her grieving never arrive as precisely or as neatly as she wants particularly in the dark days of a cold January.
Jackson throughout (female readers will no doubt correct me if this is not the case) manages to make his character wholly believable and his writing inhabits her so well that he makes for a very convincing "woman" not least since the "Widow" absolutely dominates the text and the narrative is conducted as an internal monologue. His/her reflections lead to the fact that her marriage was far from perfect but despite this she now finds herself in the words of Roger Waters leading a life of "quiet desperation" which includes irritation at office staff who hide the screen of their computers "as if they have personal access to the mainframe of the bloody Pentagon" and musing on the wonders of lists and the precision of "a plain sheet of A4, to create a two ply rectangle, approximately eight inches by six". The widow struggles through the Jackson's narrative drinking far too much wine and touching the edge of a breakdown, yet emerges with dignity. She could be an Alan Bennett creation and is grumpy and precise in her tastes not least in the lovely passage where she observes how she would like to "rent a dog" for walks along the beach but without the need to address its internal workings!
The Widows tale is sad, reflective. poignant and often very funny. It is a book that will touch anyone that has experienced bereavement and the mechanisms used to cope with it successfully and often hysterically badly. The narrative of the book unfolds at a pace that meanders gently but with purpose and while its themes may not have any big "magic realist" messages to convey or grandiose pretensions about its impact, the book stands in its own right as one of the best portraits of a lonely, self indulgent right of passage. It is in essence a sad but wry story written with real skill, conveying as it does both a act of coming to terms with a cataclysmic life event and a "pilgrimage" of exploration into the possibilities of what exists beyond this.
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