The Essence of the Thing

Humor & Entertainment

St. John, Madeleine

Humor

Fourth Estate

A Pure Clear Light

The freshest and most poignant observer of human foibles and heroic hearts since Anita Brookner, Mary Wesley and Alice Thomas Ellis. 
When Lydia sees Simon late at night driving down Westbourne Grove her suspicions are aroused. Simon, a TV film director, lives in Hammersmith with his wife Flora and their three children, what need has he for the dubious attractions of Bayswater? The attraction is Gillian, an accountant, whom Simon met at a dinner party while Flora and the children were away in la douce France. Flora struggles with her re-found Christian faith, though Anglican now rather than Roman Catholic, as Simon falls into a hopelessly passionate and sexual affair that brings its own burden and guilt. 
The smart world of middle-class West London is depicted with savage wit and a needle-sharp intelligence that will remind readers of the novels of Muriel Spark.

Literature & Fiction

Literary

A Stairway to Paradise

From the Booker short-listed author of The Essence of theThing. Madeleine St John’s new novel is a poignant, perceptive and deliciously funny portrait of modern life and an elegant anatomy of love. Her most beguiling novel to date.
Madeleine St John’s poignant and characteristically witty new novel tells the story of three people locked in an unhappy kaleidoscope of emotions and desires, none able to articulate the precise quality of their longing and dissatisfaction. There’s Alex, miserable in his cold and calmly professional marriage, unable to leave because of his two children. Next comes Andrew, recently home from ten years in America, leaving an ex-wife and a beloved daughter on the other side of the world. And finally, there’s Barbara, the enchanting and lustrous object of their affections, formidably self-possessed but strangely aimless and unfulfilled.
With elegance and acuity, Madeleine St John chronicles their progress through numerous false starts, reversals and apprehensions; the result is a memorable anatomy of desire and its opposite – despair.

Contemporary

Madeleine St John weaves a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives.

The Women in Black

British & Irish

Andre Deutsch Ltd.

On the second floor of the famous F. G. Goode department store, in Ladies' Cocktail Frocks, the women in black are girding themselves for the Christmas rush. Among the staff are Patty Williams with her wayward husband Frank, the sweet but unlucky Fay, faithful Mrs Jacob of the measuring tape, and Lisa, the new Sales Assistant (Temporary), who is waiting for the results of her Leaving Certificate. Across the floor and beyond the arch, Lisa will meet the glamorous Continental refugee, Magda, guardian of the rose-pink cave of Model Gowns. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. THE WOMEN IN BLACK is a great novel, a lost Australian classic.

The Women in Black. by Madeleine St John

Abacus Software

A haunting and hilarious novel that offers a rare glimpse into the fragility and changing nature of the human heart, this sad tale of love gone south captures the things women will do to hold on to love, and the things men will do to escape it.

Carroll & Graf Pub.

Follows the tangled relationship between Alex, a successful Fleet Street journalist, his friend Andrew, an amiable academic recently divorced and returning from the United States, and the enigmatic Barbara

A Stairway to Paradise: A Novel

At once poignant and humorous, this deliciously devised novel lights on the marriage of Flora and Simon Beaufort just at the moment it goes haplessly awry -- the moment that Simon succumbs to the temptation of his cool, blond accountant and Flora heeds the cry of her reawakened faith. Ultimately, though, neither of them can escape the revelation that lies beyond excuses and candor, at the heart of a phenomenon called love.

Carroll&Graf

From the Booker Prize nominee, a wise novel that takes a clear-eyed look at the profound nature of love and the inconvenience of desire. This smart novel ensnares three thirty-something Londoners in a moral quandary of emotion, desire, and discontent. While Alex, a successful Fleet Street journalist, has surrendered to a cold, calmly professional marriage for the sake, he says, of his two children, his old friend Andrew, an amiable academic recently back from America, has left his ex-wife and the daughter he adores on the other side of the world. Although neither Andrew nor Alex can offer the enchanting, elusive Barbara what she thinks she wants of romance, both men, in escalating degrees of desperation, try - to comic if not entirely happy consequence. "[St John] writes with grace, fluidity and emotion.... She is a wise writer, and a humane one, and A Stairway to Paradise is a beautiful book." - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World; "Deftly written and delightful.... A deeply moral novel.... St John's prose is spare but rich.... With her taut writing, she never once fails to convey the emotional intensity of her characters' lives." - Commonweal; "[An] elegant dagger of a novel, painfully on the mark." - Cleveland Plain Dealer.

A Pure Clear Light: A Novel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by St. John, Madeleine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by St. John, Madeleine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by St. John, Madeleine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Essence of the Thing

A Pure Clear Light

A Stairway to Paradise

The Women in Black

The Women in Black. by Madeleine St John

The Essence of the Thing

A Stairway to Paradise: A Novel

A Pure Clear Light

A Stairway to Paradise

A Pure Clear Light: A Novel