The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Livia or Buried Alive. This is the second book in Durrell’s Avignon Quintet but not, in my view, as good as the previous one. We learned, at the end of Monsieur, that the whole story had been invented by the writer Blanford and, in this one, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness, the first in Durrell’s Avignon Quintet. It starts with the apparent suicide of Piers de Nogaret, descendant of Guillaume de Nogaret, the man who, in 1307, arrested many of the Templars. Piers’ friend and brother-in-law, Bruce Drexel, a doctor in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Nunquam, the second-part of a two part series, started with Tunc. This one starts off where Tunc ended and finds Felix Charlock in a sanatorium, with a head wound. When he recovers, the mysterious Julian, with whom he has talked many times but never actually meets, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Helen Oyeyemi‘s Mr Fox. This is a modern updating on the Bluebeard legend. St John Fox is a 1930s US writer whose novels features unpleasant things done to women. Mary Foxe, who is entirely a figment of his imagination, berates him for his treatment of the women. Oyeyemi, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Steven Hall‘s The Raw Shark Texts. I found it a rather contrived novel that did not really work for me. It tells the story of a young Englishman, Eric Sanderson, who has had something of a breakdown – eleven times – since the accidental death in Greece of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Tunc. This is the first of a two-part series and tells of a young inventor, Felix Charlock, who invents something that seems like a spy bug but also involves storing data in a computer and analysing it, all with a slight science fiction touch. He is … Read more
Doris Lessing, the Persian-born novelist, brought up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) died this morning. She is best-known for her novel The Golden Notebook but wrote many first-class novels during her long career. We had listened to her on an old Desert Island Discs just a couple of weeks ago (you can download/listen to it … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s The Dark Labyrinth, originally published as Cefalù. It tells the story of a group of English people on a cruise in the Mediterranean and, in particular, their visit to a (fictional) labyrinth at (the fictitious) Cefalù. We start with one of their number – a poet … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Adam Foulds‘ The Quickening Maze. This a story about the poet John Clare and, to a much lesser degree, the poet Alfred Tennyson. Clare spent much of his adult life in asylums. This one tells of his time in an asylum in Essex, managed by Matthew Allen. Also … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s The Black Book. This was Durrell’s first novel, written when he was twenty-two and published in France when he was twenty-four (it was considered too obscene to be published unexpurgated in England). It has some of the hallmarks of a first novel by a twenty-two year … Read more