Stanley Middleton3.5 The Booker Prize-winning novel from 'the Chekhov of suburbia', Stanley Middleton. Rejacketed and republished by Windmill for the anniversary of its 1974 win. Edwin Fisher has fled to a seaside resort of his childhood past to try to come to terms with the death of his baby son and the collapse of his marriage to Meg. On this strange and lonely holiday, as he seeks to understand what went wrong, Edwin must find somea way to think about what he has been and decide upon where he can go next. 'At first glance, or even at second, Stanley Middleton's world is easily recognizable... The excellence of art, for Middleton, is an exact vision of real things as they are. And because he is himself so exact an observer, his world at third glance can seem strange and disturbing or newly and brilliantly lit with colour.' A.S. Byatt ‘We need Stanley Middleton to remind us what the novel is about. Holiday is vintage Middleton… One has to look at nineteenth-century writing for comparable storytelling.’ Sunday Times
Nadine Gordimer3.9 Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.
India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.
Джон Бёрджер3.2 Дж. – молодой авантюрист, в которого словно переселилась душа его соотечественника, великого соблазнителя Джакомо Казановы. Дж. участвует в бурных событиях начала ХХ века – от итальянских мятежей до первого перелета через Альпы, от Англо-бурской войны до Первой мировой. Но единственное, что его по-настоящему волнует, – это женщины. Он умеет очаровать женщин разных сословий и национальностей, разного возраста и положения, свободных и замужних, блестящих светских дам и простушек. Но как ему удается так легко покорять их? И кто он – холодный обольститель и погубитель или же своеобразное воплощение самого духа Любви?..
V.S. Naipaul3.8 No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.
In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife” - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.
Bernice Rubens4.1 In this 1970 Booker Prize-winning novel, Norman is the clever one of a closely-knit Jewish family in London's East End. Infant prodigy, brilliant barrister, the apple of his parents' eyes—until at 41 he becomes a drug addict, confined to his bedroom, at the mercy of his hallucinations and paranoia.
P. H. Newby3.5 This book is the winner of the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969. It was 1956 and he was in Port Said. About these two facts Townrow was reasonably certain. He had been summoned there, to Egypt, by the widow of his deceased friend, Elie Khoury. Having been found dead in the street, she is convinced he was murdered, but nobody seems to agree with her. What of Leah Strauss, the mistress? And of the invading British paratroops? Only an Englishman, surely, would take for granted that the British would have behaved themselves. In this weirdly disorientating world, Townrow is forced towards a re-examination of the basic rules by which he has been living his life; and into a realization that he too may have something to answer for.
