Paul Scott4.0 In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage. Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979.
Paul Bailey0.0 Peter Smart's mother is a comic monster. Only Wagner could do her justice, is one friend's opinion. She's matched by Dr F. Leonard Cottie, a retired physician, who employs her as a housekeeper and introduces the boy Peter to the facts of life.
Caroline Blackwood4.2 Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood’s masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.
Jennifer Johnston5.0 Recognised as a small masterpiece when first published in 1977, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A poignant novel about a boy in Derry jolted into early adulthood by harsh circumstances.
Penelope Lively0.0 In The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively explores the nature of history and memory as it is embodied in the life of a forty-year-old woman, Anne Linton, who unexpectedly learns that her father had a mistress. With this new knowledge, Linton must now examine the realities of her own life - of her childhood, her husband - and ask, What do they really know of her? Deeply felt, beautifully controlled, The Road to Lichfield is a subtle exploration of memory and identity, of chance and consequence, of the intricate weave of generations across a past never fully known, a future never fully anticipated.
Барбара Пим3.9 Роман известной писательницы посвящен остросоциальной проблеме западного мира - проблеме одиночества, отчуждения, ставших нормой взаимоотношений между людьми. Пим удалось выявить национальную специфику этого явления, подметить его преломление через английский национальный характер.
В центре книги судьбы четырех пожилых одиноких людей, избегающих контактов с внешним миром. Автор тонко и проницательно анализирует весьма актуальную для Англии "проблему стариков"; герои "Осеннего квартета"- жертвы буржуазного образа жизни, буржуазных представлений о жизненных ценностях.
