Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Mr Golightly’s Holiday
    Unavailable
    Mr Golightly’s Holiday
    Unavailable
    Mr Golightly’s Holiday
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Mr Golightly’s Holiday

    Written by Salley Vickers

    Narrated by Derek Jacobi

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    The new novel from the best-selling author of Miss Garnet's Angel

    holiday: a period in which a break is taken from work or studies for rest, travel, or recreation.
    [literally: holy day]

    Many years ago Mr Golightly wrote a work of dramatic fiction which grew to be an international best-seller. But his reputation is on the decline and he finds himself out of touch with the modern world.

    He decides to take a holiday and comes to the ancient village of Great Calne, hoping to use the opportunity to bring his great work up to date. But he soon finds that events take over his plans and that the themes he has written on are being strangely replicated in the lives of the villagers he is staying among.

    He meets Ellen Thomas, a reclusive artist, young Johnny Spence, an absconding school boy, and the tough-minded Paula who works at the local pub. As he comes to know his neighbours better, Mr Golightly begins to examine his attitude to love, and to ponder the terrible catastrophe of his son's death. And as the drama unfolds we begin to learn the true and extraordinary identity of Mr Golightly and the nature of the secret sorrow which haunts him links him to his new friends.

    Mysterious, light of touch, witty and profound Mr Golightly's Holiday confirms Salley Vickers's reputation as one of our most original and engaging novelists.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 27, 2014
    ISBN9780008118037
    Unavailable
    Mr Golightly’s Holiday
    Author

    Salley Vickers

    Salley Vickers’ subtle, witty style and clear-eyed observation of human nature has been compared to Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym. She has worked as a university teacher of literature, specialising in Shakespeare, and in adult education, where she specialised in the literature of the ancient world. She is a trained analytical psychologist and lectures widely on the connections between literature, psychology and religion. She divides her time between London, Venice and the West Country.

    Related to Mr Golightly’s Holiday

    Related audiobooks

    Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Santa Montefiore

      Oct 1, 2020

      Santa Montefiore
      7 min read

    • Article

      Nothing to Declare

      Jun 15, 2019

      All the senior partners were having a laugh about a movie they’d seen. Forty-Five Years. Something, something about the movie taking forty-five years to sit through. The woman McGuinness thought he recognized was in it with them at the far end of the

      24 min read

    • Article

      Grey Pride

      Oct 12, 2018

      Grey Pride
      15 min read

    • Article

      Death Is No Laughing Matter

      Nov 10, 2023

      Death Is No Laughing Matter
      3 min read

    • Article

      Love will WIN

      Sep 6, 2023

      Love will WIN
      9 min read

    • Article

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    • Article

      Grey Pride

      Jun 21, 2017

      Grey Pride
      16 min read

    • Article

      Covid’s Long Fingers

      Oct 20, 2021

      JUST when we thought it was safe to go back in the water, as in Jaws 2, Covid reminded us how sharp its teeth remain. For so long, we had been lucky to know no fatal victims of the lurgy, but recent weeks have brought the deaths of two friends. First

      2 min read

    • Article

      Patrick McCabe: ‘You Can Walk Into Some Irish Bars And Be In A Different Dimension’

      Apr 24, 2022

      At one o’clock on a Thursday lunchtime there’s not a seat to be had in the Canal Bar at the Creighton Hotel in Clones, up near the border in the midlands of Ireland. Regular couples and groups of old friends have got here early for the blackboarded s

      5 min read

    • Article

      All I Want For Christmas

      Dec 16, 2020

      IT was more than an icicle. More like an icy boulder, oversized and murkily white, faceted like a cartoon jewel and, shortly, dripping. It had lurked beneath a low stone bridge at the bottom of the wood, where sycamore thickets bald for winter gave w

      18 min read

    • Article

      A Tableau Of Life And Death

      Dec 22, 2022

      When discussing death over an intimate candle-lit dinner with a former future-ex who said she’d like her ashes scattered on the River Blackwater I got my diary out and said: “I’m free on the 20th.” Turns out this was the wrong thing to say – I only m

      3 min read

    • Article

      STRIKE IT RICH ... With This Gem

      Oct 15, 2020

      STRIKE IT RICH ... With This Gem
      7 min read

    • Article

      Where Does This Live?

      Dec 6, 2022

      The Roseville Hotel had closed many years ago, and the rooms upstairs had been converted to apartments, but the bar on the ground floor was still called the Roseville Hotel, because everyone was used to the name. One Saturday in January, John James a

      22 min read

    • Article

      The Sound Of Music

      Apr 3, 2020

      The Sound Of Music
      5 min read

    • Article

      Go on, LET YOUR HAIR DOWN!

      Aug 26, 2021

      Go on, LET YOUR HAIR DOWN!
      4 min read

    • Article

      “I Indulged In Forgiveness”

      Oct 6, 2019

      “I Indulged In Forgiveness”
      7 min read

    • Article

      Plenty Of Room At The Inn

      Dec 14, 2022

      Plenty Of Room At The Inn
      4 min read

    • Article

      Prevarication Jones

      May 1, 2019

      Prevarication Jones
      16 min read

    • Article

      The Dullard

      Jun 5, 2019

      The villagers of Yockenthwaite knew him as ‘Jack Dull’, ‘Jack Dolt,’ or sometimes just ‘The Dullard’. His real name was John Dullard, last in a long, illustrious line of Dullards, and a man – so they said – of quite miraculous stupidity. The kind of

      7 min read

    • Article

      Gringo Honeymoon

      May 17, 2021

      Gringo Honeymoon
      5 min read

    • Article

      Drawn to THE MOORS

      Feb 8, 2022

      Drawn to THE MOORS
      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Mr Golightly’s Holiday

    3.5/5

    99 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      There are two pages of review quotes at the beginning of my paperback copy of this book, and several on the back cover, and I can’t help feeling that each of the contributors has found something within that I missed. While readable, Mr. Golightly’s Holiday was nowhere near as strong, thoughtful, or beautifully written as Miss Garnet’s Angel, which had a deft, light touch to the sadness and vivid, un-stereotyped characters.The premise of this one feels like a Reader’s Digest magazine story; a bit too kitsch to be taken seriously, despite the philosophy which, while elbowed-in in places, was at least thought provoking.Mr Golightly is God. There’s no attempt at mystery in this matter; he is a white, good natured older gentleman (and Vickers could have thought a bit harder before validating that stereotype) who has come to the village of Great Calne, in Dartmoor, to attempt to write a ‘new bestseller’. Procrastination, village life, cryptic emails and writer’s block all conspire to keep him in a state ranging from benign frustration to deep sorrow over remembered loss, while becoming embroiled in a local matter of family history.Some of it is clever, much of it is thoughtful, sadness is well-evoked, and the language is always readable, but most of the characters lack conviction and this really didn’t take off for me at all.Recommendation: read Miss Garnet’s Angel and decide if you like Salley Vicker’s style enough to read something less engaging before reading Mr. Golightly’s Holiday.
    • 3/5
      When this book was given to me I anticipated something along the lines of a modern Miss Read. I was definitely wrong. What I did find was a reminder of something long forgotten - one of the reasons, many years ago, why I abandoned my attempts at classical literature and returned to the comfort of children's books. One of the things I found most difficult to cope with in literature was what I called "author omnipotence" - the sense that the author not only knows more than his/her characters, but that s/he is morally and intellectually superior. The writing always seemed to carry a slightly ironic cynicism about the "human condition" which placed the author in a position above everything being written about. I seriously struggled with that. Children's books, by contrast, I found very different. In the Famous Five, for example (okay, yes, I know!), the characters were vital and important - they mattered. What they did mattered; it wasn't all depressingly predictable due to the limitations of human nature. To take a more modern example, David Almond fills his characters with an almost mystic urgency; a magical reality of possibility.So I'm afraid Sally Vickers managed to set my teeth on edge from the beginning. Some of the characters did become more sympathetic and interesting over time, but it wasn't quite enough to compensate for the irritation. The passages toward the end are moving, but also, to me, a little melodramatic and unnecessary. And somehow I was not prepared for the startling conclusion. I didn't see it coming until Mr Golightly was packing to leave. In hindsight I find it fascinating to see a few of the levels at which the book is working, but even so, the premise somehow fails to work for me, which is a shame. One thing is certain - and also ironic - Mr Golightly appears to have a more refreshing view on his fellow characters than the narration!
    • 4/5
      I fell in love with Salley Vickers when I read "Miss Garnet's Angel" ten or so years ago. It's set in Venice, a city I simply adore. It's a beautifully imagined moment in a solitary person's life, one where limitless possibilities open up inside her.Then came "Instances of the Number 3", a very very odd book that captivated me despite my discomfort with the subject of a widow's growing fascination with her husband's transsexual mistress. These are books of courage and beauty.Now this. I wasn't at all sure why, but I was drawn to Mr. Golightly as an exemplar of the kind of quiet, reserved, polite man of late middle age that I am. (Stop laughing.) Normally I give fiction about such men a wide berth because their lives are presented as so arid and meaningless...yet this is Salley Vickers, after all, and one can trust her to find an angle not instantly obvious, can't one?Uhhh...I guess so...after all, Golightly's loss of his son is presented as the central event in his life, one that caused his entire world to rearrange and reorient itself. I know from losing my own son that this is the way many, if not most, of us respond to loss and grief for our dead children. But the writer in me was itchy. What was Vickers playing at? Where was the element of unexpectedness that her previous books delivered?I'm glad I was patient. She delivered. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't anything other than solidly conceived and executed fiction plotting. So much tidier than life.I quibble with some of the authorial choices made, I sigh frustratedly over some infelicities of editing ("hoard" when "horde" is meant, oof), and I don't at all know what I really think about her central premise as tied together at the end...I think Golightly gets off rather too easily, but then again I'm a mean old cuss...but it's Salley Vickers, so you can take it from me that it's very much worth a read and will reward you for spending your time with its gentle, flawed, angry, hurt, practical, loving characters. It's like making a village-ful of friends in a few hours, and getting to leave before they get tedious.Say...I think I just explained British cozy fiction!
    • 3/5
      Moving and lyrical tale
    • 4/5
      A quick and engaging read with a bit of a twist. Mr. Golightly is on holiday and looking to update his "magnum opus" by visiting a small English town called Great Calne. In Great Calne he encounters a number of diverse personalities, including a troubled but brilliant youth named Johnny Spence. Salvation comes in many forms.
    • 2/5
      Mr Golightly is God, and in case the reader isn't alerted to this virtually from the start by the author's insistent elbow-nudging there is an appendix of Biblical quotations to help out. Publishing a tract as fiction is nothing new (Ms Vickers acknowledges her debt to CS Lewis) but it tends to reduce the human interest. The best parts are the descriptions of Dartmoor plants, animals and scenery.
    • 4/5
      I found this quite a sweet book but not too sweet. I thought it had enough grit in the storyline to make it interesting.
    • 3/5
      Lovely mellow novel, really witty, the gentle humour is consistant throughout the book. It's a marvellous idea with a twist I just didn't see coming. I think it may be even funnier second time round.