The Devil’s Advocate, Morris West’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_West) best-selling novel of 1959, is a deft exploration of the meaning of faith. In an impoverished village in southern Italy, the life and death of Giacamo Nerone has inspired talk of sainthood. Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent from the Vatican to investigate — and to try […]
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The mass of men, Thoreau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoreau) said in 1854, lead lives of quiet desperation; and in Rose Tremain’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Tremain and http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview5) novels that mundane despair is laid bare. What she loves to probe is the inevitable space, whether a tiny crack or a gaping abyss, between desire and its realisation. When Larry Kendal began to build his pool
In his prefatory essay to A House of Children (1941), Joyce Cary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Cary) explained that he wanted to write ‘a book full of that clarity, the large skies, and wide sea views, which belong to the vision of my childhood’. In the autobiographical novel that followed, the story of a family of cousins, children of varying ages
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For all lovers of Thomas Hardy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy) this biography is required reading. Gittings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gittings) shows us the man whose last novel, Jude The Obscure, was published in 1895 but who lived on to the ripe old age of 87, dying in 1928. Latterly the author was much more concerned with poetry (http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/thomas_hardy_2004_9.pdf). Andrew (A.N.) Wilson devotes the first
Andrew Miller’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Miller_(novelist) and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/andrew-miller) extraordinary first novel, Ingenious Pain (1997), concerns the curious defect that seems to be the source of Dr. James Dyer’s ‘genius’ for the knife. It is his inability, since birth, to feel physical pain. Drive a pin through his hand, tear off a thumbnail, break his leg, flog him raw: he feels
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From the acclaimed author of Cambridge (1991) comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips
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A Guest of Honour (1970) is a long, spacious, comprehensive work of fiction. It has all the lineaments of a traditional story. It is leisurely and detailed. There is something Olympian, something magnificently confident in the way in which the writer goes about her work. Her calm certainty camouflages the ease with which she handles
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Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come to live with him;
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For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper) was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil’s biography (1929) doesn’t celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper’s own words, ‘the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.’ Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression (http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/help-information/mental-health-a-z/D/depression/). His personal tragedy however enriched English literature:
