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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals by Wendy Jones (view source)
Revision as of 14:39, 16 January 2012
, 14:39, 16 January 2012no edit summary
|audiobook=
|ebook=B006JZD8D6
|pages=208264
|publisher=Corsair
|date=January 2012
|summary=How do you get to the end of live not having loved the one you've been with, but having been with the one you should have loved? A seriously great novel from a debut author with a promising start to her career.
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It's Spring 1924 in south South Wales, and young undertaker Wilfred is going to learn the hard way how serious the trivial can be. Fascinated by a girl's dress - worn very seductively by Grace, who he has met but twice as an adult - he blurts out a marriage proposal. As much as wants to take it back, she won't let him. He tries to move on, leaving her disappointed, especially when he falls for the daughter of a man he buries, but... There are things dangerously spoken, dangerously left unsaid, and a complex web of divided loyalties and enforced connections, in this brilliant debut novel.
Jones certainly has not fallen for the debutante's trick of writing what she knows - this could not be her life and is too roundly complete to be family legend. She certainly must know Pembrokeshire to portray it so well - the village of Narberth is a character itself, and the rural surrounds and coastline propel the plot just as much as the humans. And those humans are perfect,. While Wilfred, the title character, is ever-present, Jones cuts away into the mindset of other people, going over the same conversation twice, say - and all the characters are excellent, from Wilfred's unnamed Da, to Flora his love, and Grace and her parents.
