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  • Published: 1 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099555445
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

A Kind Man




Susan Hill proves once again that she is one of our very best storytellers in this transfixing parable of greed, goodness and an extraordinary miracle.


A transfixing parable of greed, goodness and an extraordinary miracle from the author of The Woman in Black.

Tommy Carr was a kind man; Eve had been able to tell that after half an hour of knowing him. There had never been a day when he had not shown her some small kindness and even after the tragic death of their young daughter, their relationship remained as strong as before. Grief takes its toll however, and it's not surprising that by the following Christmas, Tommy is a shadow of his former self, with the look of death upon him.


But what happens next is entirely unexpected, not least for the kind man...

'Haunting' Daily Telegraph

'Richly satisfying' Independent

  • Published: 1 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099555445
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Susan Hill

Susan Hill has been a professional writer for over fifty years. Her books have won awards and prizes including the Whitbread, the John Llewellyn Rhys and a Somerset Maugham, and have been shortlisted for the Booker. She was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Honours. Her novels include Strange Meeting, I’m the King of the Castle, In the Springtime of the Year and A Kind Man. She has also published autobiographical works and collections of short stories as well as the Simon Serrailler series of crime novels. The play of her ghost story The Woman in Black has been running in London’s West End since 1988. She has two adult daughters and lives in North Norfolk.

www.susanhill.org.uk

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Praise for A Kind Man

Hill's writing here is superb, conveying emotion and pain in the sparest of prose...a comforting keenly moving tale of endurance and the eternal springs of friendship and love

Philip Womack, Literary Review

Concisely captures primal emotions and offers astonishing transformations... Movingly perceptive

David Grylls, Sunday Times

I read this short novel in one sitting; it is an enthralling story, touching and ultimately positive

Bookshelf

Susan Hill is the mistress of subtle atmosphere

Country Life

Beautiful novel

Sainsbury's Magazine

Of all the contemporary novelists who are compared to Dickens, Susan Hill probably has the best claim....Hill has produced another perfectly controlled work of fiction... What is striking about the best of Hill's fiction...is her almost Bachian ability to plumb the depths of emotion and bring the reader back out again

Amanda Craig, Prospect

Moving study of faith and humanity

Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post, Ireland

Hill impresses without seeking to astonish, and so is one of those rare writers whose work is brilliant in the single, secondary sense- not glittering, but distinguished- her prose as pleasing and surprising, say, as a perfectly round stone, or home-cooked haute cuisine

Ian Sansom, Guardian

It has a power beyond its pages; a haunting resonance between each stark sentence that stayed with me long after I'd turned the final page.The delicate balance between kindness and bitterness, hope and despair, a dying man and a dying town, are almost unbearably poignant. This is a short book that will live long in the memory

Rebecca Armstrong, Independent on Sunday

A bittersweet family drama set in an English industrial town

Katie Owen, Sunday Telegraph

Richly satisfying

Independent