In The Eyrie Stevie has created an unforgettable
character in the figure of ‘Red Dora’, the 92-year-old
Socialist veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Set in Oystermouth,
the novel, which asks profound questions about the modern
world, is alive with humour, pathos and beauty.
The new novel is the first part of her
two-book contract with Weidenfeld: Stevie has lately returned
from Egypt, where she was researching the second book, the
epic novel, Into Suez, set in the 1950s in the run-up to
the Suez invasion - published by Weidenfeld in March 2010.
AL Kennedy 3rd February 2007
The Guardian:
"Davies just writes, very precisely, sometimes wonderfully
- sometimes fiction, sometimes non-fiction - and always
from the heart. She does what a writer does - making beauty
for strangers, passing it on."
Read
AL Kennedy's review of The Eyrie
Murrough O’Brien in the
Independent on Sunday:
‘It is deeply joyful, and magically written, as full
of sea swell as of rasping barnacles.’
Nicolette Jones in the Independent:
'Davies has a tantalising way of writing glancingly about
the important developments, leaving the reader eager to
know what happened. Meanwhile inconsequentialities, lightly
handled in conversational prose and varied voices, accrete
like mineral deposits, until they make something substantial
and solid. Enjoy at leisure.'
Saga Magazine:
'Davies deals sensitively but unsentimentally with lives
less ordinary than they seem, writing with warmth and wit,
with and against the currents of modern living.'
The Sunday Times 25 February
2007:
‘Deftly mapping the [characters’] interactions,
and the unwelcome infractions of the outside world, Davies’s
novel exhibits an agile wit, an intuitive understanding
of human nature, and an unsentimental clarity in its personalising
of the political.’
Daily Telegraph 24 February
2007:
'...acute and compassionate observations.'
The Guardian 1 March 2008:
'That this is one of the fiercest books I have
read in years. It is about love, about politics, about the
consolations that only strangers can offer and is made all
the more striking in that it centres on a nonagenarian,
Dora, in the final years of her life. Vain, hawk-like Dora,
a former communist and veteran of the International Brigades,
has no intention of going gently into that good night. She
takes lessons in computer hacking and exerts a benign despotism
over the other inhabitants of the Eyrie, a converted mansion
on the Swansea coast that is refuge to an almost uniformly
charming collection of lost souls. Cosy Welsh Eirlys, always
ready to mop up tears and ply her neighbours with a slice
of bara brith, is not nearly as comfortable as she seems,
while young Hannah, an engineer in search of her father,
finds herself instead becoming Dora's surrogate child, an
act of replacement that helps Dora to finally accept the
death of her own wild daughter, lost decades before. Davies
is a meticulous, generous writer and her portrait of a life
on the brink of ending is so full of contrary, thrilling
vitality that you can practically taste the sap.'
OL
The Observer 16 March 2008:
'Quiet and intense, this is a story bereft of flash, but
none the poorer for it. Delicate, beautifully written, firmly
imbued with an unusually genuine grasp of time and place
and character, only the most hard-hearted reader will close
The Eyrie without a satisfyingly teary sigh.'
Jean Hannah Edelstein
WRITING THE EYRIE: LIVING IN THE HOUSE OF MEMORY by Stevie
Davies
An essay dedicated to the memory of Frank Regan
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