This 1982 work from Thomas Keneally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Keneally) is not so much historical fiction as fiction written in the service of history. Keneally takes great trouble to stick to the documented facts about The Holocaust. The result is a powerful evocation of the full horror of what happened within living memory, namely the greatest crime in human history. […]
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Penelope Fitzgerald (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Fitzgerald) gives us a historical novel set in Germany at the very end of the eighteenth century. The Blue Flower (1995) is the story of the brilliant Fritz von Hardenberg, a graduate of the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg. He is learned in Dialectics and Mathematics, and later became the great romantic poet and philosopher
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John Updike’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike) most famous work is his Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom quartet Rabbit Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit is Rich (1981); and Rabbit at Rest (1990). ‘Rabbit’ is the nickname that American high school basketball star Harry Angstrom obtains as a youngster. The series chronicles the life of Harry over several decades from young adulthood
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Published in 1938 and set in London during the 1930s, this is a tale of innocence betrayed, of passion, misunderstanding and the emotional atrophy of grown-ups. When 16-year-old Portia comes to stay with her cool, elegant relations in Windsor Terrace overlooking Regent’s Park, she meets Eddie, an attractive young philanderer, and falls in love. Elizabeth
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John Fowles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fowles) offers us an immaculate recreation of Victorian England entwined with a tale of passion and obsession in this novel of 1969. This story is familiar as it was brought to the screen in a brilliant film adaptation of 1981 with Meryl Streep as Sarah Woodruff and Jeremy Irons as Charles Henry Smithson. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082416/?ref_=sr_1).
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Margaret Atwood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood) is one of the finest living writers of English language fiction. In an imagined dystopian future we are given the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they
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Ursula Le Guin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Le_Guin) published The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. Her work, like a great deal of science fiction/fantasy is really about human life and human existence rather than exotic places in the Galaxy. This is the story of ‘Winter’, an Earth-like planet where the weather conditions are semi-arctic and the inhabitants are
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The Leopard was first published posthumously in 1958 in Italian as ‘Il Gattopardo’. In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation and disquiet: ‘Some huge irrational disaster is in the making.’ All around him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the
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In this novel of 1924 Thomas Mann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann) offers us a dizzyingly rich book of ideas. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps – a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and
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