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{{newreview
|author=Susan Beale
|title=The Good Guy
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=September 1964: an Indian summer in suburban Massachusetts. Ted McDougall is a twenty-three-year-old Goodyear tyre salesman who lives with his wife Abigail and ten-month-old daughter Mindy in the up-and-coming Elm Grove community. Both Ted and Abigail feel unappreciated in their roles. Ted knows his in-laws wanted him to become a lawyer and join Abigail's father's firm, but he's a good salesman and wishes they wouldn't look down on him for it. Meanwhile Abigail, an American history buff, can't master the domestic arts of cooking and cleaning, much as she tries, and longs to go back to school.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1473630339</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Christopher McGrath
|summary=This is a novel about Thomas Hardy's last days, but we get an unusual glimpse into his household at Max Gate, Dorchester through the point-of-view of his housemaid, twenty-six-year-old Nellie Titterington. She's the daughter of a local seamstress and dairyman, and with her fellow servant Alice Rigler keeps up a steady stream of bawdy banter. On his deathbed, Hardy is already more of a ghost than a real-life presence in the house. Affairs are run by Florence, his second wife, who is still viewed as something of a usurper because she was Hardy's secretary while his first wife Emma was alive and is 35 years the literary lion's junior; 'here she is, having written her way into the story line by line, just as the borer beetle eats through the floor,' as Nellie memorably puts it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1910709131</amazonuk>
}}
