Ken is a scientist, with a scientist’s dispassionate eye for the material world. He reviews his life from the difficult 1930s, through the slaughter of World War I, back to an idyllic boyhood in the Highlands. When the mature man finally reaches the source of the river that has haunted his imagination for so many […]
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised
On the Black Hill (1982) is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the 20th century. In depicting the lives of Benjamin and
‘My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema. One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back
Since the success of Brazzaville Beach (1990), William Boyd (http://www.williamboyd.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Boyd_(writer) has enjoyed a reputation as a male novelist who understands women and writes believably from a female viewpoint. Given that women hold up rather more than half the market as novel-buyers, the reputation has undoubtedly proved useful. With Restless (2006), he enters the female-friendly territory
In Michael Frayn’s (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/michael-frayn and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Frayn) novel Spies (2002) an old man returns to the scene of his seemingly ordinary suburban childhood. Stephen Wheatley is unsure of what he is seeking but, as he walks once-familiar streets he hasn’t seen in 50 years, he unfolds a story of childish games colliding cruelly with adult realities. It is
Soho in the Fifties and London half a century later form the two interlocking time frames for Maggie O’Farrell’s (http://www.maggieofarrell.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_O%27Farrell) 2010 novel. A chance meeting in a Devon Lane between a bored graduate, Alexandra Sinclair, and a flamboyant older man with a broken-down car instigate events that, decades on, will have an unprecedented effect on new parents Elina and
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In 1857 when Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of rum smugglers from the Isle of Man have most of their contraband confiscated by British Customs, they are forced to put their ship up for charter. The only takers are two eccentric Englishmen who want to embark for the other side of the globe.
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The centrepiece of this book by Alasdair Gray (http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/ and http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/) is the text of ‘Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer’, said to be written and published at his own expense (in 1909) by Archibald McCandless. Belying its stolid title, this tells of a student doctor’s only friendship with the equally solitary
