Фрэнсис Фавьелл – лучшие книги

1939 год. В Лондоне неспокойно — Великобритания объявила войну гитлеровской Германии, чьи войска бесчинствуют в Европе. Столица переполнена беженцами; в ожидании налетов и обстрелов лондонцы записываются в волонтеры, участвуют в тренировках по разбору будущих завалов и эвакуации гражданского населения. Молодая художница Фрэнсис Фавьелл возвращается в столицу из вояжа по британским колониям, где она отлично зарабатывала, рисуя портреты индийских раджей, и поначалу ее смешит и раздражает кажущаяся бесполезной лондонская суета. Однако, когда фашисты, в рамках операции «Блиц», начинают массированные бомбардировки Лондона, шутки кончаются……

Recovering from an illness, Rachel, an 18-year-old art student at the Slade in London, is advised to spend a year in a warm climate. She agrees to go to France to act as companion to Cynthia, a delicate, temperamental woman whose husband is in India, and her two children, troubled 15-year-old Thalia and spoiled young Claude. Thalia quickly becomes devoted to Rachel, but their friendship is strained by Rachel's romance with the son of a well-to-do Breton family.

Though it's the awkward, emotional Thalia who lends the novel its title, it's Rachel on whom the novel centers, poignantly telling the tale of her sad first love, her dawning awareness of the vagaries and dishonesties of social life, and the tragedy she is powerless to prevent.

Set in Brittany in the mid-1930s, with an excursion to the cafEs and artists' studios of Montparnasse, Thalia is a dramatic and poignant tale by the author of A Chelsea Concerto. It includes an afterword by the author's son, John Parker, and other supplementary material.

‘You don’t want to mind about any of this,’ said the driver, waving a hand at the grey ruins and the greyer dust. ‘In a few days you’ll be so used to it that you’ll like them. Berlin’s a grand place! I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world, and that’s a fact.’

‘No more perceptive portrait of Germany in defeat has been etched in word than Frances Faviell’s first book, The Dancing Bear, which made so powerful an impact upon me that I read it in a single sitting.’ Guy Ramsey, Daily Telegraph

‘Berlin during the decisive years from 1946 to 1949. … The prostitution which paid so handsomely; the black market which brought in rich rewards, although it meant that the Berliners had to part with treasured possessions; the night clubs which catered for still baser tastes; the impoverished intellectuals and the starving professors and the poor who had only their wits with which to eke out a bare sustenance—all this and much else the author describes with insight, incisiveness, and realism.’
Times Literary Supplement

‘There is great charity in this book; there is the sharp, limpid eye of the artist; there is sound realism; and there is an unswerving, passionate desire to tell the truth.” John Connell, Evening News

‘They were hard and terrible times, and brilliantly does Frances Faviell describe them for us. We meet the Altmann family and follow their joys and troubles. … The book is a brilliant pen-picture of the post-war years. We have British, French, American and Russian characters, but the background is always Berlin, and the strange tunes to which its bear danced.’ Liverpool Daily Post

This new edition includes an afterword by Frances Faviell’s son, John Parker, and other supplementary material.

Having made her publishing debut with The Dancing Bear, a superb memoir of life in Berlin immediately after World War II, Frances Faviell applied first-hand knowledge to fiction, telling the riveting, harrowing tale of one large, troubled family in Germany nearly a decade after the war’s end.

In a town near Cologne, rebuilding is proceeding at a frantic pace, factory work is plentiful and well-paid, and the dark days of near-starvation have ended. But Joseph, a former Allied prisoner of war, and his enormous brood—his wife having received a medal under the Nazis for bearing more than 10 children—face new problems ranging from the mother’s infidelity, the oldest child’s involvement with a brutal youth gang leader, and a beloved adopted daughter’s plans to marry an American soldier.

Vividly portraying the love and conflict of a large family and the dramatic, sometimes tragic social change of Germany’s postwar recovery, A House on the Rhine is a powerful, heartbreaking tale from the author of the London Blitz memoir A Chelsea Concerto. This new edition includes an afterword by Frances Faviell’s son, John Parker, and other supplementary material.