'Like an Anita Brookner story, Giles Waterfield's first novel describes a complete emotional world lived out in claustrophobic surroundings. This beguilingly old-fashioned novel ... Like all good period pieces, Waterfield evokes the allure of a vanished life-style, while exposing its more ludicrous excesses' Independent
'This haunting first novel is a study of marriage, love and fear. An almost perfect period piece' Express
'elegantly understated style... gentle and humane' Guardian
`Waterfield has captured to perfection the languid, leisured expat lifestyle... culminating in a terrible, haunting, unexpected ending'
Daily Mail
'This is a beautiful book based on Waterfield's grandparents. He writes with a clarity sweetened with kindness about their fear and confusion and about their flaws of character that rendered them unable to survive the changes forced upon them.' the Times
'Extraordinary first novel' Express (in round-up of hottest reads for the summer)
' Giles Waterfield,formerly Director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery took the McKitterick with his troubling,unsentimental elegy.for an English family living on the French Riviera . . . This year's McKitterick and Sagittarius contenders included names already eminent in neighbouring fields: the poet and journalist Blake Morrison; the academic and short-story writer, Jane Stevenson; the former Beiruit hostage and memoirist Brian Keenan; and the journalist Brian Clarke' Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'Giles Waterfield's exquisitely poised first novel THE LONG AFTERNOON is set in the Riviera resort of Menton between and during the world wars: luxe, calme et volupte interrupted by a quiet but resonant tragedy' Lucy Hughes Hallett in The Sunday Times
