In 1914 Vera Brittain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Brittain) was 21 years old, and an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford. This is the memoir of an upper middle class woman who volunteers to become a nurse in World War 1, and finds her attitudes to herself and her society completely changed. Yet this is not just her story. As she herself writes, […]
Testament of Youth Read More »
Brilliant, witty and zestful memoirs from this writer and TV presenter. Full of acute analyses. Originally published 2001. 560 pages in Picador paperback edition. ISBN 978-0330418812
This is a multi-award winning biography of the poet who voiced the concerns of the Victorian era. Tennyson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennyson) was Poet Laureate for an astonishing 42 years. To go with this, listen to the BBC Radio 4 ‘In Our Time’ 45 minute episode on Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam. Available from the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124pnq With
Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart by Robert Bernard Martin Read More »
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Read More »
‘… None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs’, Gustave Flaubert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaubert) observes in what must be the Madame Bovary’s most celebrated quotation, ‘or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Read More »
This novel tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the ship over to Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey Read More »
A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the treacherous odyssey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As he attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soon-to-be-defeated South, Ada struggles
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Read More »
No less than a panorama of post-war US history from the 50s to the 90s. Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLillo) creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life. A huge, baggy
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. Briony badly misconstrues this and another
Atonement by Ian McEwan Read More »
