August is a Wicked Month

Product Information

She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O'Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. After a number of false starts with hotel staff, Ellen falls in with a louche crowd of hangers-on surrounding an American film star. This is more of a precursor to the Charles Manson darkness with which that decade culminated than a celebration of excess. Back at home front, a tragedy strikes and the husband, not knowing where his wife is, does the thing on his own. 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.

The titles are in black and orange on a white orange framed panel on the front, in black only on the back cover and in black and green on the spine. Upon publication August Is a Wicked Month, as with most of O'Brien's early books, was banned in several jurisdictions, including by Ireland's strict Catholic rulers.They goto a burlesque show and the flirting and innuendos continue but Ellen is really only interested in the actor. The Summer Before the Dark’ by Doris Lessing: A well-educated woman contemplates her future after 20 years of marriage and motherhood at a time when having a career wasn’t open to all. 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.

She is separated from her husband, lonely, and still figuring out what she wants in life - which is fine, normal, and should be talked about, especially at the time it was published in 1965. The reader will want to get into the book, grab Ellen by the shoulders, and shake some sense into her while she’s in France and then will want to comfort her once she is home. I was that determined that I'd be living vicariously through the licentious protagonist, Ellen, and I figured we'd be friends for years. This started out in a light hearted way - a sticky August, the beginnings of a potentially stickier liaison and then the decision to abandon London and head to Cannes where a holiday might promise the luxury of fast men, faster cars and nights of heady passion as surf crashes on beaches and the Moroccan zephyr flutters the luxuriant drapes of the master bedroom. BTW I couldn’t add this to your A Year of William Trevor page, and you’re on a break at Twitter, so here’s the link to Fools of Fortune (which I read this month to tie in with Cathy’s Reading Ireland month).This review is a complete spoiler, so if you have not read the book and plan to, you might want to read it first. She tells her new acquaintances that she’s English to avoid uncomfortable conversations about religion and Catholicism. Banned in several countries on first publication, Edna O’Brien’s August is a Wicked Monthis a shimmering, sensual tale of a woman rediscovering herself – and it feels just as glorious, radical, and escapist as today.