August is a Wicked Month

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Later she meets a group of wealthy party-goers who explore the Riviera, beaches, restaurants and a fabulous French mansion. A fine first edition, first impression, first printing of Edna O¿Brien¿s fourth book August is a Wicked Month in hardback cloth covers with a near fine dust jacket, published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1965. O'Brien doesn't set her up as some blameless heroine, although she's swept along with the activities of this jet-setting crowd.

She escapes to the French Riviera and meets a new range of people, all the time realising that she is yearning for something that cannot be experienced through meaningless sex. This novel might be made into an independent movie, but it could never be a mainstream Hollywood film with Julia Roberts. A short novel, it is nevertheless jam-packed with the O'Brien's trademark haunting prose - in her best works ( House of Splendid Isolation, In the Forest), her trance-like writing is both comforting and harrowing - often at the very same time. Given the significant esteem in which O'Brien appears to be held, I will be intrigued to read others' views as it seems the book must have powers to touch other people in ways that just didn't resonate with me.A Woman of my Age’ by Nina Bawden: A woman begins to question everything about her life and her marriage when she goes on holiday to Morocco with her husband.

Otherwise, I would have wondered if the Wicked Witch of the East would have some kind of sexual prowess or power as a witch too. O’Brien really does a fine job of getting into the mind of her character, including the repulsive aspects of her wandering. Separated from her husband, Ellen finds herself living alone in a city she dislikes - a place that denies her past and offers no hope for her future. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

Back at home front, a tragedy strikes and the husband, not knowing where his wife is, does the thing on his own. If you want to see how a masterful author can develop a character so real seeming that you want to befriend, help, and guide her, this book does that and more. She languishes on in France where flirting now becomes a compulsive distraction as well as a physical need. For a while, I thought maybe O'Brien was showing the emptiness of a life based on liquor, sex, and celebrity. And so begins an account of a range of superficial encounters told in an almost dreamlike way - I felt a strong sense of a detachment from reality.

There are at least two sentences like this that refers to the bed's performance of the man as being wicked. Although this book is about a lonely 28-y/o housewife, Ellen, she is not really your sex-starved character who sleeps with men from one bed to another. The central character is so lost, that you ache for her while at the same time you'd like to slap her and tell her to get over it (though I can't honestly say my choices would have been any different). A new voice, not the same Kate of The Country Girls trilogy, a slightly older but much more mature woman. I don't regret reading this slim volume, but I can't say that I will be recommending it to very many people either.

More of a novella, O'Brien does a tremendous job of bringing us inside the mind of a woman, Ellen, who is hurting and insecure after a divorce.

You feel like you are watching a girlfriend do all sorts of things that you know are bad for her, and you just want her say please stop doing this to yourself, but you also know she won't listen. Holidaying in France and eating an artichoke is no longer the height of decadence - and please, please do not describe a penis as resembling 'a foxglove in a secret glade'. I found it quite a different type of read from the same author's The Country Girls Trilogy, and look forward to reading more by her to see if she is yet again able to sucessfully make another stylistic change, or if it will more closely match one or the other of her books I have already completed.Another well written Edna O'Brien novel, but not as entertaining and charming and the first two in the Country Girl series. Lose yourself in the legendary Edna O'Brien's simmering tale of a woman rediscovering herself on the French Riviera . A brilliant and prescient 1965 exploration of the darker aspects of the 1960s sexual revolution and how it introduced new oppressions for women, in particular: seemingly mandatory promiscuity and a stress on slimness that causes neurotic calorie-counting.