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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Dostoyevsky’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dostoyevsky and http://www.fyodordostoevsky.com/) novel of 1880 is so profound it’s hard to summarise. The briefest of outlines would be that it concerns the murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a corrupt, loutish landowner, and the aftermath for his sons: the passionate Dmitri, the coldly intellectual Ivan, the spiritual Alexey, and the bastard Smerdyakov. The Brothers Karamazov is
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Lanark has more claim of importance in the life of William Wallace than Stirling. The local William Wallace Heritage Trust has long campaigned for more to be made of the connection. In this work Dr. James Mackay shares meticulous research on what can really be known about the man apart from the myth. Read this
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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Steven Pinker (http://stevenpinker.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker), Professor of Psychology at Harvard, is truly one of the big beasts of academia. One suspects that he must suffer from headaches because it seems he’s got six brains inside one skull. Not content to confine his research to learned journals Pinker has published, amongst other titles, The Language Instinct (1994),
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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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