Along with Anna Karenina (mistitled, since its other couples' relationships are as important as Anna's), this is probably. the greatest of all novels. Eliot weaves the interlocking lives of a small village in 1830s England, showing the social situation, class-bound but also shifting against the wider politics and even medical science of the early Industrial era. Her major characters also grow across the span of the years covered to learn valuable life lessons and have their values tested against shifting financial and social changes for each individual. Questions of self-awareness and ultimate choices abound, with surprising reversals and changes, so the basic character interactions continually shift and challenge a reader's own sympathies. Brilliant!
Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasurehouse of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece…
Through vivid characters within a family, this book evokes the history and changing conditions in South Africa from apartheid to its post-Mandela conditional progress, which affects the lives of three siblings and their Black servants/neighbors.
WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
On her deathbed, Rachel Swart makes a promise to Salome, the family’s Black maid. This promise will divide the family—especially her children: Anton, the golden boy; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by feelings of guilt.
Reunited by four funerals over thirty years, the dwindling Swart family remains haunted by the unmet promise, just as their country is haunted by its own failures. The Promise is an epic South African drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of history, sure…
LeGuin's light science fiction really could have been an imagined contemporary world, as it contrasts a socialist- anarchistic society with a truly contemporary capitalist and government-authoritarian system. Its central character, committed to the former, visits and experiences the latter, only to realize that individualism can still contribute in a more egalitarian order. The book raises basic questions about behavior within a larger community and its dominant values with a strong central character who leads the life of the mind.
One of the very best must-read novels of all time - with a new introduction by Roddy Doyle
'A well told tale signifying a good deal; one to be read again and again' THE TIMES
'The book I wish I had written ... It's so far away from my own imagination, I'd love to sit at my desk one day and discover that I could think and write like Ursula Le Guin' Roddy Doyle
'Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power' OBSERVER
The Principle of Simultaneity is a scientific breakthrough which will revolutionize interstellar civilization by making possible instantaneous…
A comprehensive overview of old age in European art from ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth century. It not only explores portraits of the aged, including self-portraits, but also features narratives of old age protagonists in biblical, mythic, and literary texts, touching on the contrasting stereotypes of wisdom versus folly of older people. A final chapter focuses on aged great artists who took bold, new experiments in their final decades after long, successful careers, revealing a series of distinct "old age styles." All audiences interested in art and the conditions and assumptions about old age.
