Last Quests Of The Season

by Sue Gee

A novel which explores the darker side of family life. When two English families travel to Portugal on holiday together, unexpected tensions and conflicts arise. As events move towards tragedy, no one sees who is to be the real victim. By the author of "Visits to My Sister" and "Keeping Secrets".

288 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 11, 2012

About the author

Sue Gee was born in India, where her father was an Army officer. She had a her elder brother, Robert, now a retired radiographer living in Spain. She grew up on a Devon farm, and in a village in Leicestershire, before instaled in Surrey in 1960. She lived in north London for 27 years with the journalist Marek Mayer, they had a son, Jamie. She married Mayer in November 2003, less of two years before his death on 23th July 2005. Now, she lived in the town of Hay-on-Wye in the Welsh borders.

Published since 1980, her novel Letters From Prague, was serialised on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Her play, Ancient and Modern, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2004, with Juliet Stevenson in the lead role. Her novel The Hours of the Night which received wide critical acclaim and was the controversial winner of the 1997 Romantic Novel of the Year Award, an award she won again in 2004 by her novel Thin Air.

She was Programme Leader for the MA Writing programme at Middlesex University from 2000 to 2008. She is currently reading for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has been awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship.

Reviews

[Deese · Rating 1 out of 5]

So boring that you don't care what happens as long as it ends. As a matter of fact nothing really happens in this book, even the most dramatic moment ends with nothing happening. These 2 couples and their kids are together for 2 weeks but it seems like 2 years. Frances one of the characters is in love with a woman Dora back home and pines for her throughout her stay, ignoring her husband and kid who by the way is a pain in the butt. The other couple is just plain boring whereas Frances is annoying and boring. Things are hinted at and you think they might come to fruition, but like I said nothing happens! The couples and their kids go back to London or wherever they came from -- intact and alive, period, so spoiler alert.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. I mooched this after the author was praised in a blog I respect: http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogs...

The characters all live and breathe, well distinguished from each other. The plot is full of well-signalled moments where you think things are going to go seriously wrong (oh dear, children not well supervised, and in Portugal too). But the things that go wrong are more subtle and better realised than that.

The poverty of the Portuguese village, and the different attitude to animal welfare, is striking.

I was just expecting more.

[Marie Theron]

Written in a Virginia Woolf-like style with slow, lazy days, few happenings. All the action has to do with the inner lives of people and the hurt it can cause. The reader also senses all sorts of moral messages. The author mentions Bloomsbury throughout, so there is no doubt in the the reader's mind as to what the author is trying to do.



Portugal is well portrayed as a place where time is in limbo.