Margaret Atwood
The
Blind Assassin
Book Description
Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically
prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port
Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the
First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her
far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's
tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin,
a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also
a devoted cult following.
Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one; while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama.
Synopsis
Even now, at the age of 82, Iris lives in the shadow cast by her younger
sister Laura. Now poor and trying to cope with a failing body, Iris reflects
on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her
sister's tragic death and the novel which earned her such notoriety.
Paul Auster
The Book of Illusions
One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh . . .
Mann was a comic genius, in trademark white suit and fluttering black moustache. But one morning in 1929 he walked out of his house and was never heard from again. Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be alive? Zimmer cannot decide - until a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.
Written with breath-taking urgency and precision, this stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another.
Available in the library
Louis de Bernières
Captain
Corelli's Mandolin
Synopsis
When the Axis powers reach the Greek island of Cephallonia, a young Italian
captain is billeted in the doctor's house. Captain Corelli turns out to
be an accomplished musician, and for a while the war seems to suit them
well. But then the brutality of the conflict catches up with them.
Captain
Corelli's Mandolin is
set in the early days of the second world war, before Benito Mussolini
invaded Greece. Dr Iannis practices medicine on the island of Cephalonia,
accompanied by his daughter, Pelagia, to whom he imparts much of his healing
art. Even when the Italians do invade, life isn't so bad--at first anyway.
The officer in command of the Italian garrison is the cultured Captain
Antonio Corelli, who responds to a Nazi greeting of "Heil Hitler"
with his own "Heil Puccini", and whose most precious possession
is his mandolin. It isn't long before Corelli and Pelagia are involved
in a heated affair--despite her engagement to a young fisherman, Mandras,
who has gone off to join Greek partisans. Love is complicated enough in
wartime, even when the lovers are on the same side. And for Corelli and
Pelagia, it becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate the minefield
of allegiances, both personal and political, as all around them atrocities
mount, former friends become enemies and the ugliness of war infects everyone
it touches.
British author Louis de Bernières is well known for his forays
into magical realism in such novels as The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether
Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The Troublesome Offspring
of Cardinal Guzman. Here he keeps it to a minimum, though certainly the
secondary characters with whom he populates his island--the drunken priest,
the strongman, the fisherman who swims with dolphins--would be at home
in any of his wildly imaginative Latin American fictions. Instead, de
Bernières seems interested in dissecting the nature of history
as he tells his ever-darkening tale from many different perspectives.
Captain Corelli's Mandolin works on many levels, as a love story, a war
story and a deconstruction of just what determines the facts that make
it into the history books.
Available in the library
Tracy Chevalier
THE
GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING
Synopsis
A brilliant historical novel on the corruption of innocence, using the
famous painting by Vermeer as an inspiration. Griet, the young daughter
of a tilemaker in seventeeth century Holland, obtains her first job, as
a servant in Vermeer's household. Tracy Chevalier shows us, through Griet's
eyes, the complicated family, the society of the small town of Delft,
and life with an obsessive genius. Griet loves being drawn into his artistic
life, and leaving her former drudgery, but the cost to her own survival
may be high.
Available in the library
Falling
Angels
Chevalier herself writes after the story's end that "the Acknowledgements is the only section of a novel that reveals an author's "normal" voice. Every character uses their "normal" voice in this novel, and Chevalier's own voice excels in ensuring that each one is unique (for example, everything is "delicious" for Livy), so that, like Mr Coleman mourning his daughter growing up, you will "miss her when she goes". --Olivia Dickinson
Review
In Falling Angels, Tracy Chevalier has combined a moving elegy to the
lost innocence of the 21st century's grandmothers and great-grandmothers
with a reminder of the strength and modernity of their aspirations and
achievements. Maude and Livy are aged six in 1901, when Queen Victoria
has just died and the whole country is in mourning. In 1910 they are almost
young women who have experienced their own personal losses and belong
to a generation who are no longer prepared to wear black for months to
mark the death of Edward VII. Their families, the Colemans and the Waterhouses
("no relation to the painter"), meet in a graveyard beside their
family graves. One has a large marble angel erected above it, the other
an urn (an allusion more to the morbidity of a Victorian columbarium than
the eternity of Keats' pre-Victorian "unravish'd bride of quietness").
Their choices of a monument to death seem to reflect their differing attitudes
to life, but Chevalier makes clear that these two families are forever
linked in their fates and aspirations.
The story moves swiftly, switching to multiple narratives: young but quickly
maturing Maude and Livy; the adult Colemans and Waterhouses; their servants;
and Simon the gravedigger boy. Chevalier has chosen carefully who speaks
when, and who, more importantly, keeps silent. Livy's little sister Ivy
May is one of the most beguiling figures of the work, but is given only
two sentences of her own (and those two bring a lump to the throat). Mrs
Coleman's experiences with the campaign for women's suffrage are marginalised
through silence; Maude and Livy tell instead of their reaction to the
women's antics. And while Falling Angels may be a story of women, despite,
or perhaps because of their exclusion from contemporary politics, Simon's
observations are the most honest and revealing.
Available in the library
Johnathan Coe
The
House of Sleep
Synopsis
A comedy about the powers we acquire and relinquish when we fall asleep,
and when we fall in love. It features Sarah who is narcoleptic, Terry,
a disillusioned film critic for whom sleep is a memory, and for Dr Dunstan,
sleep is nothing less than a global disease.
The
Rotter's Club
Synopsis
Jonathan Coe's new novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop
of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young
friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put
their own distinctive spin on to events in the wider world. A zestful
comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful
moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines
its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in
which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an
IRA bomb.
J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace
Synopsis
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable
to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college
authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job, but instead he
refuses and resigns, retiring to live with his daughter on her remote
farm.
Reviews
Amazon.co.uk
Review
Emerging from the dissident calibrations of literary voices joined together
in the culture of protest against the apartheid regime, the distinctive
writing of novelist, critic and academic J M Coetzee has become identified
as one of the most finely tuned among contemporary Southern African writers.
From the local recognition accorded his earliest novel Dusklands to the
international acclaim with which his rewriting of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
story, Foe was received, Coetzee has dedicated himself to transforming
South African writing from a blunt weapon of struggle to a delicate and
incisive instrument of reflective liberation.
Elizabeth
Costello
Synopsis
A profound new work of fiction from one of the greatest writers alive.
Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown; she
is feted, studied, honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that
established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape,
she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function
is to be venerated and applauded. One of a new breed of intellectual nomads,
her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms
throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself
to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American
college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer
in residence on a cruise liner during which she encounters a fellow guest
lecturer, an African poet also employed to divert the passengers; a visit
to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree,
an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting
some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers'
conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly
amongst the audience. She has made her life's work the study of other
people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her,
what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her
vision and the verdict of future generations. Elizabeth Costello is a
humane, moral, and uncompromising creation; J.M. Coetzee's latest work
of fiction offers us a profound and delicate vision of literary celebrity,
artistry and the private life of the mind.
Michael Cunningham
The
Hours
Synopsis
Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her
rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In 1990s New York,
Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers for a party for her AIDS-suffering
poet-friend. This novel meditates on artistic behaviour, love and madness.
Bret Easton Ellis
AMERICAN
PSYCHO
Synopsis
Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on
Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with.
His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible
things to women. He is living his own "Americalkkjjjkkrp9n Dream".
Brett
Easton Ellis established a reputation as the enfant terrible of American
fiction in the 1980s with his controversial novel Less than Zero, but
with the publication of American Psycho he became established as one of
the most notorious and reviled novelists currently writing. American Psycho
deserves its controversy. The novel opens with a sign scrawled above a
New York subway station: "Abandon hope all ye who enter". So
begins a hellish descent into the world of Patrick Bateman, the novel's
protagonist. Bateman is a handsome 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie, who
spends his days listening to Whitney Houston and working out which exclusive
restaurant to eat in and what clothes to wear in a dizzying parody of
1980s consumerism run mad.
However, Bateman also has a darker side; he is a psychopathic serial killer,
with a penchant for torturing and sexually abusing young women before
killing them in the most gruesome and explicit fashion. The novel contains
little actual plot, and consists of extended descriptions of exclusive
restaurants, designer clothes, TV shows and the minutiae of Bateman's
vacuous world, relieved only by clinically described scenes of torture
and mutilation which are not for the faint-hearted. Bateman makes little
attempt to justify his actions, merely claiming that "this is the
way the world--my world--moves". As a satire on the bankrupt, money-driven
world of the 1980s, American Psycho is a successful, if rather heavy-handed
piece of fiction, whose controversy seems only set to increase. --Jerry
Brotton
Sebastian Faulks
Birdsong
Synopsis
Set in France before and during World War I, this is the story of a young
Englishman who is impelled through a series of extreme experiences, including
a traumatic love affair which tears apart the bourgeois French family
with whom he lives. By the author of "The Girl at the Lion d'Or".
Stephen Fry
The
Hippopotamus
Synopsis
Fired from his newspaper and disgusted with a world that undervalues him,
Ted Wallace seeks a few months repose and free drink at the country mansion
of his old friend, Lord Logan. But strange things have been going on at
Swafford Hall, phenomena beyond the comprehension of a hippopotamus like
Ted.
The Stars' Tennis Balls
Synopsis
For Ned, 1980 seems a blissful year. Handsome, charming, popular and talented,
his life is progressing smoothly, effortlessly, happily. And when he meets
the lovely Portia Fendeman his personal jigsaw appears complete. But timing
is everything in life, and his life is about to change for ever. Things
are going to get very bad indeed for innocent young Ned. A promise made
to a dying teacher and a spiteful trick played by fellow pupils will rocket
Ned from cricket captain to solitary confinement, from head boy to hell.
When Ned emerges he is a man bent on just one thing - revenge; and revenge
is a dish he plans to savour and serve to those who conspired against
him. Part love story, part thriller, a gloriously rich mix that only Stephen
Fry can dish up to us, The Stars' Tennis Balls will leave you happy and
replete.
Available in the library
Nick Hornby
High
Fidelity
Synopsis
Rob is a music junkie who owns record shop in Islington. Unable to make
his relationship with Laura work, he seeks refuge in the company of the
two hopeless guys, and in a one night stand, only to find that life with
Laura has its unexpected attractions.
Available in the library
About
a Boy
Synopsis
Will is 36 and doesn't really want children. But then he comes across
12-year-old Marcus and it's pretty clear that Marcus would like a dad.
The trouble is, Marcus is weird - a boy who prefers Joni Mitchell to Nirvana.
He also knows something about Will that he can definitely use.
Available in the library
How
to Be Good
Synopsis
According to her own moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair.
She's a doctor, and doctors are decent people, and her husband David is
the "Angriest Man" in Holloway. When David suddenly becomes
good, Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself
some questions.
Available in the library
John Irving
The
Hotel New Hampshire
Quirky,
bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything
but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is.
The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous.
It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which
he does, with dubious success in both a former girls' school in New Hampshire,
and in Vienna.
It is the Berry children who grab the readers' attention, sympathies and
love - all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest), John
(the narrator), Lily (the writer) and Egg (the youngest). When Irving,
or rather John, writes 'Frank's queer, Franny's weird, Lily's small and
Egg is Egg' the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening
'yes, I know what you mean!'
The
World According to Garp
'Like
all extraordinary books, The World According to Garp defies synopsis...'
wrote the Chicago Sun-Times when Garp was first published in 1978. It
is a marvellous, important, permanent novel by a serious artist of remarkable
powers...
Garp is a book that captivates all who read it. Peopled with the most
extraordinary characters you will ever meet, here is a novel that will
make you laugh, make you weep, and, above all, make you think.
A
widow for one year
Synopsis
Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character - a "difficult"
woman. By no means is she conventionally "nice", but she will
never be forgotten. Her story is told in three parts, each focusing on
a critical time in her life.
Available in the library
Kazuo Ishiguro
The
Remains of the Day
Synopsis
An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country
in the 1950s. The climax of his journey is to be a reunion with his former
housekeeper. This 1989 Booker Prize-winner attempts to capture a period
in British history and draw a portrait of a man in old age.
Available in the library
Yann Martel
Life
of Pi
Some books defy categorisation: Life of Pi, the second novel from Canadian writer Yann Martel, is a case in point: just about the only thing you can say for certain about it is that it is fiercely and admirably unique. The plot, if that’s the right word, concerns the oceanic wanderings of a lost boy, the young and eager Piscine Patel of the title (Pi). After a colourful and loving upbringing in gorgeously-hued India, the Muslim-Christian-animistic Pi sets off for a fresh start in Canada. His blissful voyage is rudely interrupted when his boat is scuppered halfway across the Pacific, and he is forced to rough it in a lifeboat with a hyena, a monkey, a whingeing zebra and a tiger called Richard. That would be bad enough, but from here on things get weirder: the animals start slaughtering each other in a veritable frenzy of allegorical bloodlust, until Richard the tiger and Pi are left alone to wander the wastes of ocean, with plenty of time to ponder their fate, the cruelty of the gods, the best way to handle storms and the various different recipes for oothappam, scrapple and coconut yam kootu. The denouement is pleasantly neat. According to the blurb, thirtysomething Yann Martel spent long years in Alaska, India, Mexico, France, Costa Rica, Turkey and Iran, before settling in Canada. All those cultures and more have been poured into this spicy, vivacious, kinetic and very entertaining fiction. --Sean Thomas
Available in the library
Ian McEwan
The innocent
Book Description
The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and
West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham,
assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in
an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses
his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life – and to
lose his unwanted innocence. The promise of his new life begins to be
fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team,
while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex
by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to
horror in the course of one terrible evening – a night when Leonard
Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.
Synopsis
It was 1955 and the corpse of post-war Berlin was crawling with spies.
A British Post Office technician began his descent into ever deeper echelons
of electronic surveillance beneath the surface of Berlin. By the award-winning
author of "The Child in Time" and "Black Dogs".
Amsterdam
When
good-time, fortysomething Molly Lane dies of an unspecified degenerative
illness, her many friends and numerous lovers are led to think about their
own mortality. Vernon Halliday, editor of the up-market newspaper The
Judge, persuades his old friend Clive Linley, a self-indulgent composer
of some reputation, to enter into a euthanasia pact with him. Should either
of them succumb to such an illness, the other will effect his death. From
this point onwards we are in little doubt as to the novel's outcome--it's
only a matter of who will kill whom. In the meantime, compromising photographs
of Molly's most distinguished lover, foreign secretary Julian Garmony,
have found their way into the hands of the press, and as rumours circulate
he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is
no surprise to find that the rather unsavoury Garmony comes out on top.
McEwan is master of the writer's craft, and while this is the sort of
novel that wins prizes, his characters remain curiously soulless amidst
the twists and turns of plot. --Lisa Jardine
Synopsis
A contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty. Clive
Linley and Vernon Halliday are former lovers of the recently-deceased
Molly Lane. They make a pact following her funeral, which both tests their
friendship to the limits and has consequences neither has foreseen.
Atonement
We meet
13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage
a production of her new drama The Trials of Arabella to welcome home her
elder, idolised brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins,
the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to
the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting
preoccupations come onto the scene. The charlady's son Robbie Turner appears
to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the Fountain and sends
her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen
for a war to promote his new "Army Amo" bar; and upstairs Briony's
migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon,
secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present...
The interwar upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully
sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green,
but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the
novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even
personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains and dangers
of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling
what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about
readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative and at times moving
book that will have readers applauding.--Alan Stewart
Daniel Philippe Mason
The
Piano Tuner
Available in the library
Muriel Spark
Far Cry from Kensington
Synopsis
Set in a rooming house near South Kensington underground this novel portrays
the horror as well as the romance in bedsitter land. It is written by
the author of "Girls of Slender Means" and "The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie".
The Pride of Jean Broodie
Synopsis
She was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic,
her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform
a group of young girls under her tutelage into the "creme de la creme"
of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome.
Anne Tyler
Back When We Were Grownups
Synopsis
After losing her husband in a motor accident, at 53 Rebecca asks herself
whether she is an imposter in her own life. Is she really the joyous and
outgoing celebrator that her family think she is? What would have happened
if she'd married her college sweetheart? And should she try to find him
again?
Available in the library
A
Patchwork Planet
Synopsis
Barnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of 30, he's the black sheep of
a philanthropic Baltimore family. He has an almost pathological curiosity
about other people's lives, and a hopeless charm which attracts the kind
of angelic woman who wants to save him from himself.
Breathing
Lessons
Synopsis
One hot summer day Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore towards Pennsylvania,
to the funeral of the husband of Maggie's best friend. During the course
of that journey, the author shows all there is to know about a marriage.
The author also wrote "Saint Maybe" and "Morgan's Passing".
Ladder
of Years
Synopsis
One day, during a family seaside holiday, something which has already
begun to fray quietly snaps. Delia simply walks off the beach, away from
her husband, Sam, and her three almost grown-up children. In a nearby
town, she reinvents herself as a serious and independent-minded woman
without ties.
Alice Walker
The Color Purple
Synopsis
Set in the segregated world of the Deep South between the wars, this text
is a challenging read for students aged 14 and above. It is part of a
series of contemporary women's writing, in editions designed specifically
for schools.
Available in the library