There are not many historical novels of which it can be said that they illuminate both the time that forms their subject matter and the time in which they are read: Doctor Copernicus is among the very best of them. The work of Nicholas Koppernigk, better known as Copernicus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernicus), shattered the medieval view of […]
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To rendezvous with her archeologist fiance in Jordan, Barbara Vaughn must first pass through the Mandelbaum Gate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbaum_Gate), which divides strife-torn Jerusalem. A half-jewish convert to Catholicism, an Englishwoman of strong and stubborn convictions, Barbara will not be dissuaded from her ill-timed pilgrimage despite a very real threat of bodily harm and the fearful admonishments
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Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection (1989) is the apparently straightforward story of one week in a man’s life in which he
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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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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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This is a very unconventional book — it’s nearly all dialogue, and the characters all seem to speak the same way, even the children. Sometimes what they say is nonsensical, and other times they come out with brilliant gems. The acerbic Compton-Burnett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Compton-Burnett), who wrote 19 largely similar books, is not to everyone’s taste, although
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
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