It is unlike anything
else I have read, a kind of forensic pathologist’s report on the body and brain
of a woman, her younger self. She dissects a sexual affair, which absorbed her
completely. There is nothing tender or sentimental here.
A divorcee in her 50s
with grown-up sons, she neglects her career, scouring the shops for silk
underwear and stiletto heels, reliving the details of their latest bedroom
gyrations and longing for the next encounter. The (younger) man, who likes fast
cars and sharp suits, wants the sex, nothing more.
Ernaux’s honesty, unsparing
detail and detachment are extraordinary, and narrated in a limpid, simple,
impeccable style, well worthy of her Nobel Prize.
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference.
With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in…
At 79, Howard looks
back on her life. Beautiful and talented, she lacked any instinct for
self-presevation, and was exploited by numerous well-known men of letters.
She drifted through life feeling helpless and
disregarded, but unable to take any initiative, allowed her baby daughter to be
taken away by a nanny, and ended up monstrously mistreated by her husband
Kingsley Amis. The combination of miserable passivity and amazing frankness is
unique, and I found this book unputdownable.
Slipstream brilliantly illuminates the literary world of the latter half of the 20th century, as well as giving a highly personal insight into the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard, one of our most beloved British writers.
'This is a brave, absorbing and vulnerable book' - Guardian
Elizabeth looks back over the course of her eventful life, providing a story of as full of love, passion and betrayal as her novels.
Born in London in 1923, she was privately educated at home, moving on to short-lived careers as an actress and model, before writing her first acclaimed novel, The Beautiful Visit,…
This may be a
children’s book, but reading it as an adult I found it poetic, funny, and
deeply moving.
The characters keep switching from being real animals to
Victorian bachelors with comfortable residences, and there are constant
hilarious touches, like Toad combing his hair (!) before an outing. Things have
changed since 1908, when it was first published, and the portrayal of nature
now seems terribly poignant – the seasons succeed each other peacefully, the
river flows in all its beauty: nature, it seems, will stay the same forever.
How I envied Grahame and his world!
Spend a season on the river bank and take a walk on the wild side . . .
Spring is in the air and Mole has found a wonderful new world. There's boating with Ratty, a feast with Badger and high jinx on the open road with that reckless ruffian, Mr Toad of Toad Hall. The four become the firmest of friends, but after Toad's latest escapade, can they join together and beat the wretched weasels?
PLUS A behind-the-scenes journey, including author profile, a guide to who's who, activities and more.
Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is a book full to bursting with life, both comic and tragic. At the heart of this novel about love, politics, and society, strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death, is the generational divide between the young and the old. When the young university graduate Arkady and his mentor, the nihilist Bazarov, leave St. Petersburg to visit their aging parents in the provinces, the conflict that ensues from the generations’ clashing views of the world—the youths’ radicalism and the parents’ liberalism—is both representative of nineteenth-century Russia and recognizably contemporary.
In this fresh new translation Nicolas Pasternak Slater and
Maya Slater have captured Turgenev’s subtle humor, his pitch-perfect ear
for dialogue, his compassion, and, above all, his skill as
a storyteller
