It is 1926 and the First World War is gradually receding into the past. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. The only, but huge, missing […]
The Light Between Oceans Read More »
Rubashov is an ex-Commissar of the People in a thinly disguised world of Moscow Show Trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Show_Trials) in this 1940 novel from Arthur Koestler. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler) This is pretty hard-to-read stuff as we are taken deeper and deeper into the solitary agonies of Rubashov in prison, and as he is being ‘interrogated’ (i.e. psychologically tortured and beaten) by
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler Read More »
OK, it’s possible to live as a hermit in some desert hideout and subsist on locust and wild honey. For most of us, though, we live in communities and are surrounded by people. This means we live in a moral context. All our actions, either by commission or omission, send out ripples of consequence like
Adam Bede by George Eliot Read More »
How should the anti-hero, Bird, deal with the intrusion into his life of a brain-damaged child? Welcome to the sordid underbelly of Japan. It’s all a long way from the hyper-ordered, law abiding, civil society that we imagine. Oe’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenzabur%C5%8D_%C5%8Ce) striking and vivid language matches perfectly the depravity into which Bird descends in his attempt to evade
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe Read More »
American couple Port and Kit Moresby seek to escape the corrupting influences of the modern world by travelling into the Algerian Sahara. Wherever you travel, though, you never really escape yourself. The exotic landscapes, and the trials within them, only serve to intensify the couple’s mutual estrangement. Latch this onto a pervasive mood of threatening
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles Read More »
McCullers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_McCullers) takes us to a Georgia mill town in the 1930s. The characters she portrays yearn for something beyond the sun baked tedium of small town life. The central character is John Singer, a deaf-mute, through whom we meet and are made to enter into the lives of the dispossessed. There is a remarkable surety of
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers Read More »
Meet identical twins Dora and Nora Chance in this rollicking family saga revolving around the British music hall scene. Witty and pulsating with imaginative power, this is sure to entertain you. Published by Angela Carter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Carter#Biography) in 1991, this was her last novel. 256 pages in Vintage Classics paperback edition. ISBN 978-0099981107 Angela Carter
Wise Children by Angela Carter Read More »
The setting is the Italian city of Ferrara on the eve of the Second World War. The rich and detached Jewish family of Finzi-Continis keep themselves secluded in their ostentatious property behind an imposing garden wall. The narrator, Giorgio, a poorer member of the Jewish community, falls in love with their lovely daughter Micol. Having met her
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani Read More »
James Pawkie, haberdasher in Gudetown (based on Irvine), rises by degree to the ultimate position of local power – that of Provost. This is a brilliantly acute fictional analysis of small town ambition, politics, power and manipulation. The Provost convinces by the realistic deployment of small detail and its ironic touch. Be prepared for the use
The Provost by John Galt Read More »
