The Service Of Clouds - Couverture rigide

' The Service of Clouds contains echoes of Virgina Woolf's To the Lighthouse...Hill is rare among contemporary writers...a meticulous, down-to-earth and strangely beautiful novel.' The Times

'In the bleak setting of a half-derelict hospital for the very old, Molloy, an ageing doctor, keeps watch with the dying...in holding the hands and wiping the faces of the dying, he is making amends for the fact that his mother died alone. Hill then draws us in another layer, and we follow the life story of Molloy's mother, Flor. Grave, fiercely independent yet vunerable, her character is formed by a series of bereavements and bitter disappointments...Skillfully structured, seamlessly blending past and present...Hill's lean, sharp prose and consistently detached tone creat a severe and rather beautiful book..that flows silkily off the page.' Independent

'Hill's new novel is intelligent and perceptive, cool yet more moviing, concerning the universal matters of love, death and the affairs of the human heart.' Scotsman

'A quietly passionate study of family tragedy written in luminous, impressionistic prose.' Michael Arditti, Independent, Books of the Year

At the far end of the long white gallery is a painting of a woman, in pale flowing clothes and lying on a sofa beside an open window. The muslin curtains billow out towards her like clouds. There is a touch of brilliant red, the ribbon on her hat. The rest is white, cream, palest grey. It is a painting which leads Flora on, beckoning her away from her childhood, her complaining, clinging mother, pert younger sister, and the confines of a small community, to a proud and self-reliant future. But later, this image is to prove the catalyst for the most signicant event in her life. Isolation, separation, solitude, betrayal. The shocks of life. The consolations and the beauty of death. A few piercing moments of absolute joy and perfect understanding. THE SERVICE OF CLOUDS is about these things, and also about love, loyalty, friendship, growing up and growing old.