Dancing Backwards »

Salley Vickers has worked as a dancer, an artist’s model, a university professor of literature, and a psychoanalyst. She now writes full-time.

Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise to New York to visit Edwin, an old friend. As she makes the six-day crossing, she relives the traumatic events that led to her losing Edwin’s friendship and abandoning her career as a poet for the safety of marriage and domesticity.

Despite her natural reserve, she meets a rich variety of passengers traveling with her, who affect her understanding of her own past. Most significant, she meets Dino, the dancing host, whose motives in befriending Vi are shady but who teaches her to ballroom dance and inadvertently helps her to recover from her past.

Moving between the late sixties and the present day, Dancing Backwards is written with the lightness of touch and psychological insight that characterize Salley Vickers’s acclaimed work. This bittersweet novel is subtle, poignant, and wonderfully entertaining.

Publishers Weekly

Leaving her grown sons in Britain, recently widowed Violet Hetherington takes a six-day transatlantic cruise to New York to look up an old friend whom she let down decades before. Naturally shy, Violet is drawn out of her shell by a fascinating cast of fellow seafarers, including the crude Les Garson and his long-suffering wife, Valerie; the wise Miss Foot; dance instructor Dino, a suave Briton with a fake Italian accent; anxious steward Renato; cheerful couple Ken and Jen Morrison; and intellectual Americans Martha Cheever and Balthazar Lincoln. Taking the advice of Miss Foot to heart--"The world always responds if we listen"--Violet, taken by her new companions, follows her instinct to dance, and gets closer to Dino, who helps Violet reconcile her traumatic past. Interwoven with the at-sea narrative are vignettes from Violet's past, including her unhappy life with abusive first husband Bruno, which sheds light on her personality quirks, her emotionally risky journey, and her long-abandoned dreams. The latest from British author and literature professor Vickers is a moving story of a good second-chance romance. (Aug.)