Timothy Mo0.0 Оver the last two decades Timothy Mo has been responsible for producing some of the best postcolonial fiction written in English. From his debut Monkey King, to two of his finest novels Sour Sweet and An Insular Possession, Mo has written with great wit and political intelligence about the postcolonial condition from his own uniquely Anglo-Asian perspective. With Renegade or Halo Mo confirms his status as one of the finest novelists currently writing about globalisation, decolonisation, migrancy and cultural hybridity.
Renegade or Halo2 is narrated by Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, a black Filipino who size and skin colour owe more to his anonymous American GI father than his Filipina bar-girl mother. Lifted from the barrios of Mactan by an unlikely pair of Jesuits, Rey begins the most extraordinary of picaresque journeys across the globe, which takes him from the Philippines to Hong Kong, Thailand, the wonderfully evoked fictional Gulf state of Bohaiden, London and Cuba. Along the way Rey moves in and out of the high and low of Mo's vividly imagined world, from the frighteningly macho fraternities of Manila high society, to the stateless and the dispossessed who haunt the backstreets of the Gulf states and the fringes of London's metropolis. A true renegade, Rey never fully embraces any of the communities through which he moves, shrugging off the fear and racism he encounters with his own unique response, summed up by the first words in the book: "Love your enemies. Far better than your friends, the dolts define you."
This is a wonderful novel which never descends into an idealisation of the emigrant, as Rey's encounters and adventures lurch from incongruous hilarity to sickening violence and depravity. Rey is a marvellous imaginative creation (as are some of his many sidekicks along the way), a fascinating and unlikely mixture of ingredients, as appealing as the Filipino desert Halo, which gives the novel its title. Whilst the novel resists the usual moralising of so many bildungsroman novels, it's a stinging but also very humane meditation on the enduring tribalism and racism of our global world. --Jerry Brotton
Джулия Блэкберн0.0 To escape from her own sadness, a woman finds refuge in a past time. In a village by the sea she watches the lives of the inhabitants unfold around her. But the year is now 1410 and this is a world of devils and miracles, a world in which there are no clear boundaries between reality and the power of the imagination.
A man's discovery of a mermaid washed up on the sand starts a chain of events that leads three of the villagers to accompany the enigmatic figure of the leper on a pilgrimmage to the Holy Land. The woman joins them and sets out without the certainty of ever coming home again.
The Leper's Companions was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
Michael Frayn3.8 Martin Clay, a young would-be art historian, suddenly sees opening in front of him the chance of a lifetime: the opportunity to perform a great public service, and at the same time to make his professional reputation - perhaps even rather a lot of money as well. Thus he finds himself drawn step by step into a moral and intellectual labyrinth.
Christopher Hart0.0 A debut novel about adolescence and first love, English nature and the profound changes affecting the rural landscape. With no job and no prospects, young country-boy Lewis Pike is casually seduced by a married woman. When she ends the relationship, his fragile world disintegrates.
Дэвид Дэбидин0.0 A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies; recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, not its truthfulness. In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.
Kathryn Hughes0.0 Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot (1819-1880) achieved lasting renown with the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. Her masterworks were written after years of living an unconventional life, including a scandalous voyage to Europe with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes. The scandal intensified when she moved in with Lewes after he separated from his wife. Eliot re-entered London's social life years later, when her literary success made it impossible for respectable society to dismiss her (even Queen Victoria enjoyed her books). She counted among her friends and supporters Dickens, Trollope, and several other Victorian literati. In this intimate biography, author Hughes provides insight into Eliot's life and work, weighing Eliot's motivations for her controversial actions, and examining the paradoxical Victorian society which she documented to perfection in her novels.
