For many Austen devotees, "it is a truth universally acknowledged" that MANCHESTER PARK is Jane Austen's least engaging novel. But picking up MANCHESTER PARK again this year was a revelation and an argument for second readings. I remembered it from a first encounter forty years ago as the one Jane Austen book that I didn't enjoy. It was also the one Austen novel I'd never reread, until this year. Fanny Price, the main character, couldn't hold a candle to Lizzie Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, I'd thought. She was timid and without an ounce of spirit or wit. Yes, Fanny is not Lizzie Bennet. And that is Austen's point. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Lizzie admits (after that pivitol, disastrous proposal scene) "until that moment, I never knew myself." Her pride in her cleverness led to her faulty judgments. Fanny is not witty or clever, but Austen shows her developing powers of moral discernment throughout the novel. (She is the one Austen heroine that we follow from childhood to maturity.) Fanny knows herself, and she understands the people around her. She knows that to accept a fundamentally weak and morally flawed suitor would end in unhappiness and disaster. Fanny, poor and dependent on wealthy relatives, knows all this and makes the right choice, despite the material advantages of marriage to a rich man. Ah, like Lizzie Bennet's, my "first impressions" were wrong. Fanny Price, I apologize.
'Full of the energies of discord - sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion and vanity' Margaret Drabble
Jane Austen's profound, ambiguous third novel is the story of Fanny Price, who is accustomed to being the poor relation at Mansfield Park, the home of her wealthy plantation-owning uncle. She finds comfort in her love for her cousin Edmund, until the arrival of charismatic outsiders from London throws life at the house into disarray and brings dangerous desires to the surface. Mansfield Park is Austen's most complex work; a powerful portrayal of change and continuity, scandalous misdemeanours and true integrity.
MY FATHER'S HOUSE is the first novel in Joseph O’Connor’s “Rome Escape Line Trilogy, “ based on the real-life Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest serving at the Vatican. He and a band of allies dubbed “the Choir” smuggle diplomats, Jews, and allied soldiers out of Rome. The novel’s structure is a countdown. The opening chapter’s heading reads, "119 hours and 11 minutes before the mission” (an operation that’s slated for Christmas Eve, 1943). Delia Kieran, wife of an Irish diplomat, and Monsignor O’Flaherty, the Choir’s Conductor, drive a critically ill member of the team through German checkpoints, searching for medical help. The emergency threatens to upend the Choir’s plans. O’Flaherty scrambles to piece together an alternative scheme. Too ill to take on the mission, he isn’t sure anyone else is up to the task. The reader follows one of the choristers on a hallucinatory nighttime trek across Rome to deliver money to resistance operatives. The climax is a confrontation with Paul Hauptmann, the Nazi commander in Rome. Periodically, the novel jumps ahead to post-war interviews with the surviving choristers. These sections are never interruptive; they’re marvels of condensed character revelation, allowing the Choir’s members to speak to us directly.
From the acclaimed, bestselling author of Star of the Sea and winner of the 2021 Irish Book Awards Book of the Year for Shadowplay, comes a gripping and atmospheric new novel set in occupied Rome.
September 1943: German forces have Rome under their control. Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann rules over the Eternal City with vicious efficiency. Hunger is widespread. Rumors fester. The war’s outcome is far from certain. Diplomats, refugees, Jews, and escaped Allied prisoners flee for protection into Vatican City, the world’s smallest state, a neutral, independent country nestled within the city of Rome. A small band of unlikely…
In PRECIPICE, it’s the summer of 1914, and the “guns of August” are only weeks away. In the middle of the unfolding crisis, the married Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, pursues a distracting love affair with Venetia Stanley, a woman half his age. He writes to her obsessively, often two and three times a day. Sometimes, he dashes off notes during cabinet meetings, sharing sensitive government intelligence about the looming war with Germany. Enter Scotland Yard, which stumbles on the correspondence and assigns a young detective sergeant to monitor the affair and read the letters before they’re delivered. Two of the novel’s three narrative strands are true; only the Scotland Yard plot is fiction. Harris’ Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer is keen at first, diving into his surveillance assignment. Before long, he questions his superiors’ motives, sensing he’s a pawn in some larger political game. Readers know the outcome of the mounting international crisis. Still, we feel the tension and suspense of the weeks leading to war. As for the Asquith-Stanley affair, how damaging will it be? Astonishingly, Harris doesn't invent the prime minister’s letters. H.H. Asquith wrote over three hundred to Venetia Stanley in under two years. She kept them all. Those alive in 1914 and survived the war remembered that summer as a golden one. In Precipice, we catch glimpses of Downton Abbey-like picnics, with armies of servants carrying linen tablecloths, champagne, and silver across emerald lawns. It’s a sliver of English life and a highly privileged one. Like so much else, it will be smashed to bits by the cataclysm.
“Robert Harris is, simply put, masterful.”—Karin Slaughter
A spellbinding novel of passion, intrigue, and betrayal set in England in the months leading to the Great War from the bestselling author of Act of Oblivion, Fatherland, The Ghostwriter, and Munich.
Summer 1914. A world on the brink of catastrophe.
In London, twenty-six-year-old Venetia Stanley—aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless—is part of a fast group of upper-crust bohemians and socialites known as “The Coterie.” She’s also engaged in a clandestine love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most…
A SLASH OF EMERALD is the second book in the series featuring a trail-blazing female doctor in Victorian England. Dr. Julia Lewis and Inspector Richard Tennant of Scotland Yard team up again. They first collaborated in MURDER BY LAMPLIGHT. This time, their investigation takes them into the Victorian art world. Poison pen letters, slashed paintings, and women's gallery shows defaced . . . A harassment campaign against female painters becomes a murder investigation when their models vanish and turn up dead. A third novel follows in February 2026: MURDER BY MOONRISE.
