The Long Afternoon - Hardcover

A witty and beautifully written period piece (Tatler)

'A witty and beautifully written period piece' Tatler

'Place and time are vividly evoked... Real descriptive power' The Lady

Bliss... all the places rose up like visions, and I walked through the house as though I had lived there myself (Margaret Forster)

'Waterfield is good at re-creating the ease and the idleness of their existence, cushioned by faithful servants and almost excluding the French. He communicates its attractiveness while gently exposing its self-indulgence... Waterfield's light touch makes it easy to read' TLS

Unique and subtle... More poignant than E. F. Benson, more believable than Anita Brookner, rivalling the best of William Plomer, this captivating novel speaks with a humane and civilised voice, suffused with a kind of irony. I would like to hear more from it (Country Life)

'Waterfield evokes their hypochondriac rituals with sympathy and with an irony that is intensified when their two sons, educated in England and hardly acquainted with their parents, visit in the late 1930s. But the Williamsons' fragile existence is disintegrating, and when they are finally destroyed by the second world war, the couple achieves... genuine pathos' Sunday Times

'Lovingly recreates the glamour of the jazz age and the beauty of the French Riviera in the shadow of World War II' Publishing News

'...Vibrant. Henry and Helen Williamson leave England to live on the French Riviera. However, their blind belief that the international upheaval of events leaing up to the Second World War cannot disrupt their tennis club and tea-room existence is sadly misplaced' Bookseller

'Unique and subtle... More poignant than E. F. Benson, more believable than Anita Brookner, rivalling the best of William Plomer, this captivating novel speaks with a humane and civilised voice, suffused with a kind of irony. I would like to hear more from it' David Watkin, Country Life

Henry and Helen Williamson arrive on the French Riviera looking for a house. Barely thirty, Henry has been forced to retire from the Indian Civil Service due to ill health. The dream-like Villa Lou Paradou enchants them. Carefully they build a life of comfort, with Helen creating a beautiful garden and Henry enjoying the pleasures of the tennis club, the drama society and the company of wounded English officers - the shadow over them is not only Henry's health, but the European conflict. As the story unfolds we see a portrait of a marriage freighted with the seeds of its own destruction as the gifted husband is ensnared by his wife's neuroses, and the paradise they have created for themselves is eaten away from within.