The Other Side of the Fire

by Alice Thomas Ellis

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1 review
I read this in one long gulp overnight. A somewhat lighter, more casual Ellis. Excellent as always and notable for the (very funny) novel-within-a-novel "A Grope in the Heather"

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31+ Works 2,010 Members
Alice Thomas Ellis (also writes as Anna Margaret Haycraft), is a novelist and columnist. She was born in Liverpool, England in 1932. She attended Bangor Grammar School and the Liverpool School of Art. Ellis wrote a weekly column for the Spectator from 1985 to 1989 and for the Catholic Herald from 1990 to 1996. She co-wrote two books on juvenile show more delinquency with psychiatrist Tom Pitt-Atkins. Ellis also wrote A Welsh Childhood, a book recounting the history of Wales and featuring the photographs of Patrick Sutherland. Ellis has written several novels beginning with The Sin Eater in 1977. The novel won the Welsh Arts Council Award. Other novels include Unexplained Laughter which won the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year in 1985 and The Inn at the End of the World which was the winner of the Writer's Guild Award for Best Fiction in 1991. Another novel, The 27th Kingdom, received a Booker Prize Nomination in 1982. She was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature from 1999 until her death in 2005, due to lung cancer. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Common Knowledge

Original publication date
1983
People/Characters
Claudia Bohannon; Charles Bohannon; Philip Bohannon; Evvie; Sylvie (Evvie's mother); Violet, a cow in Evvie's romance novel (show all 7); Gloria, Sylvie's vicious dog
First words
On the last day of summer Mrs Bohannon fell in love.
Quotations
The cure for love ... was marvellously simple, necessitating only the realisation that you can have anything you desire, providing you don’t desire it too greatly. ... If Claudia could be brought to understand that, if she ... (show all)would sit quietly by her fire, bows and arrows out of sight, then sooner or later her prey would emerge from the undergrowth, unicorn-like, and lay his head in her lap, then ... much of the urgency would go from her longing.
Sylvie always jumped when the telephone rang, as though an unseen lunatic had suddenly screamed in her ear. Consequently whenever she picked it up she sounded slightly hostile.
Sylvie wondered what had happened to the permissive and loose-living young. All the ones she'd met recently were dauntingly moralistic. They ate Health Foods, and while, admittedly, they didn't get married much they paired ... (show all)off very early and stayed together for ages and ages. They made her feel immature, an axolotl.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It really didn't matter any more.

Classifications

Genres
Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, Romance
DDC/MDS
823.914Literature & rhetoricEnglish & Old English literaturesEnglish fiction1900-1901-19991945-1999
LCC
PR6055 .L4856 .O7Language and LiteratureEnglishEnglish Literature1961-2000
BISAC

Statistics

Members
64
Popularity
477,659
Reviews
1
Rating
(3.89)
Languages
Dutch, English, French
Media
Paper, Audiobook
ISBNs
9