Penelope Fitzgerald3.4 On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets.
It is Nenna’s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. The result is one of Fitzgerald’s greatest triumphs, a novel the Booker judges deemed “flawless.”
Thomas Keneally0.0 By the acclaimed author of the Academy Award-winning movie Schindler's List, this Civil War saga is both a riveting account of America at war and a tapestry of human drama.
V.S. Naipaul3.2 Set in an unnamed African country, the book is narrated by Salim, a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast. He believes "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." So he has taken the initiative; left the coast; acquired his own shop in a small, growing city in the continent's remote interior and is selling sundries – little more than this and that, really – to the natives. This spot, this "bend in the river", is a microcosm of post-colonial Africa at the time of Independence: a scene of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation and poverty. And from this rich landscape emerges one of the author's most potent works – a truly moving story of historical upheaval and social breakdown.
Julian Rathbone0.0 Joseph Bosham, self–styled third Viscount of Bosham, with a half–English Catholic priest for a father and an Italian brothel–keeper in place of a mother, educated in mathematics, music, and philosophy, but with a gift for narrative and a natural bent for depravity, was born into the turbulent Europe of 1790 and settled in Spain. There, gypsies, devil–worshippers, and the remnants of the Inquisition fought for space with the great armies of Wellington and Napoleon. Seduced by the hectic glamour of battle at the age of eleven and tossed in its wake for the next fifteen years, little José survives as courier, pimp, linguist, mercenary, and mascot to tell his poignant, comic, richly entertaining, and tantalizingly unreliable tale. Shortlisted for Britain’s Booker Prize in 1979, and now available for the first time in paperback, Julian Rathbone’s re–invention of the picaresque is a riotous, complex, and deliciously subversive masterpiece.
Fay Weldon2.8 Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations, from prostitute to rape victim, wife to adulteress and eventually becomes the accidental leader of an international women's movement.
Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey - peppered with more than a few detours along the way...
Now in her ninth decade, Fay Weldon is one of the foremost chroniclers of our time, a novelist who spoke to an entire generation of women by daring to say the things that no one else would. Her work ranges over novels, short stories, children's books, nonfiction, journalism, television, radio, and the stage. She was awarded a CBE in 2001.
