Killing Time

ALAN BENNETT's works for stage and screen include Talking Heads, Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of George III, an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, The History Boys, The Habit of Art, People, Hymn, Cocktail Sticks, Two Besides and Allelujah! His collections of prose are Writing Home, Untold Stories (PEN/Ackerley Prize, 2006), Keeping On Keeping On and House Arrest. His fiction includes The Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories.

Is Killing Time a parable? A satirical Lord of the Flies for tart-tongued OAPs? A joyously juicy series of character studies in a care home in which pretty much every line comes with some sharp observation? Yep, all of the above . . . This is the embroidering of a master, a writer who can make intricacy feel easy. ― THE TIMESSo accustomed are we now to Bennett's prose that it takes a mental leap to notice just how good he is, how finely tuned his sentences, the microscopic power of his observation. ― iNEWS Alan Bennett is back with deadpan gallows humour . . . it becomes obvious that Bennett, with his gentle narrative voice, has lulled us into a story that takes the scandalous tragedy of care home deaths from Covid-19 as its true subject. ― FINANCIAL TIMES Bennett is in his element in such an establishment [as Hill Topp House], attuned to both the grim apprehensions of old age and its awful comedy, and shifts deftly between the two. It is familiar territory, but nobody does it like him . . . his sentences remain as devastatingly, casually precise as ever . . . The story's conclusion manages quietly, wryly, and without the least trace of sentimentality, to touch the heart. ― GUARDIAN Full of wit and style. Alan Bennett employs his pitch-perfect repertoire of satirical skills in his first book for five years . . . a wry little rejoinder to Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club. ― OBSERVER It's at the bottom of Killing Time's first page when anyone ignorant of whom they were reading might suspect Alan Bennett. 'He's dead, Mr Ellis. Mr Firbank was always the main man. Was it him you were wanting?' Any other writer would put, I think: 'Mr Ellis is dead. Mr Firbank was always in charge. Was it him you wanted to speak to?' The differences are small, but in them lies the key to Bennett's mastery, his ear for the tiny idiosyncrasies of language and all that they reveal. ― SPECTATOR