Rhidian Brook3.5 Everything in Taliesin Jones's small-town life in Wales has suddenly become uncertain. His mother has run off with her hairdresser. His father has taken to talking to the walls, but at least he's talking, as his brother has gone entirely mute. At school, Julie Dyer blows confusing smoke rings at him and Hoop the Mental says there is no God. When Taliesin tries to find this out for sure no one seems to have the answer-no one except Billy Evans, an old man with an exceptional and miraculous talent.
Philip Hensher0.0 WINNER OF A SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 1997 -- A stunning novel of political life, betrayal and passion, which lifts the lid on vice within the Palace of Westminster ... and cost Hensher his job as a House of Commons clerk. 'At the centre of this book is John, a distinguished widower with a hump, two daughters, and an important job in the House of Commons. He also has a fondness for visiting rent boys in the afternoons, and a passion for secrecy... Sharp and funny... a beautifully polished performance.' Times Literary Supplement 'Sex, politics and death are the classic themes of Hensher's original novel. Set in Parliament at the time of the fall of Margaret Thatcher, it follows the disintegration of the family of a Commons clerk... Hensher is both sharp and melancholic. Here he is on Thatcher: When she walked she seemed to extinguish a cigarette beneath every pace; in her walk, it could be seen that she was in the right.' Observer 'Incisive characterisation, first-class dialogue... Set amid the wigs and gowns of parliamentary officialdom, Philip Hensher's second novel exposes the hidden tensions in apparently banal lives.' Sunday Telegraph
Кейт Клэнчи0.0 These are poems about men and boys: married men, self-sufficient men, wounded men, and men 'who own/the earth and love it'; poems about memory and time, set in school classrooms and muddy sports fields; and haunting, tender love poems.
Francis Spufford0.0 The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies the danger and mystery that fueled the romantic allure of the poles and, subsequently, the British imagination. Far from being a conventional history of polar exploration, I May Be Some Time attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of the polar explorers as they headed toward destinies like Terra Nova.
Serving up a heady brew of Captain Perry, Jane Eyre, gastronomic obsessions with iced desserts, and the daily lives of Eskimos, Spufford treats the reader to one of the most satisfying and imaginative contemporary works dealing with exploration and human need.
