Evening Class (novel) Evening Class (novel) Evening Class is a novel by Maeve Binchy. It was adapted as the award-winning film "Italian for Beginners" (2000) by writer-director Lone Scherfig, who failed to formally acknowledge the source, although at the very end of the closing credits is the line 'with thanks to Maeve Binchy'. A story of many Irish men and women from various backgrounds and how a teacher, Nora O'Donoghue (known as "Signora"), and an Italian evening class changes their lives over the course of a year. Each chapter deals with the life story of one or more students in the class. In
The Light of Evening that it "evokes the cruelty of estrangement while allowing her characters to remain sympathetic and giving them real voice." "Slate" reviewer Claire Dederer described the novel as challenging to start reading, but epitomizes O'Brien's focus on "the poetic and the sensational", while at times the "lyricism" and "sentamentalism" "get away from her". Dederer concludes that the novel does two things: it "stands apart, refusing to give mere comfort." The Light of Evening The Light of the Evening is a 2006 novel by Irish novelist Edna O'Brien. The novel explores the relationship between one of O'Brien's archetypal defeated rural women, who