Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Thursday, October 6, 2022

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham

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  Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham is a profoundly surprising book. Written in 1930, the novel begins its story in the Edwardian age prio...
Sunday, March 25, 2012

The Republic Of Love by Carol Shields

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Republics do not have kings or queens, nor princes or princesses, so, we must assume, fairytales are out. Winnipeg is not exactly a republic...
Saturday, January 14, 2012

Characters mutually fragmented - Trespasses by Paul Bailey

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Trespasses by Paul Bailey presents the reader with an early challenge. The principal character, Ralph Hicks, or Ralphie to his mother, has s...
Thursday, December 22, 2011

Marriage under scrutiny - A review of Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy

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In the postscript to the preface of Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy quotes a German reviewer of the novel. Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was de...
Monday, June 13, 2011

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

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Like father, like son… This could be the motto that underpins Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. This might be a rather flippant way of summaris...
Friday, March 4, 2011

None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

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Life often presents an illusion of constancy or even continuity. They are illusions, of course, because ultimately we can never take anythin...
Saturday, July 17, 2010

Worst Fears by Fay Weldon

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Fay Weldon’s novel Worst Fears starts and finishes with bereavement. It examines how a woman deals with simultaneous loss and revealed betra...
Saturday, May 2, 2009

Love, etc by Julian Barnes

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It’s hard to imagine a more perfect marriage of form and content than Love, etc, in which Julian Barnes continues the story of characters th...
Monday, October 6, 2008

Lives In Time - The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

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For me, The Amateur Marriage represents the sixth time I have read one of Anne Tyler’s novels. On the surface it’s the story of Michael and ...
Saturday, September 6, 2008

The South by Colm Toibin

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The South by Colm Toibin is an intense, though fitful chronicle of a woman’s life, a life as yet incomplete. It presents a patchwork of deta...
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene

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Anyone who has lived in London could place the Common that forms a geographical centrepiece in The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene. It do...
Monday, February 25, 2008

The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin

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The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin is a deeply emotional, deeply moving book. It’s the story of Eamon Redmond, a complex man, grown on tende...
Saturday, February 23, 2008

Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai

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In her novel, Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai eventually accomplishes what many writers attempt and then fail to achieve. She uses light touc...
Thursday, January 3, 2008

Masterpiece: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

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The fly cover of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan describes the book as “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his pow...
Monday, October 1, 2007

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons is a giant of a book, a giant because of the way in which it gently wraps you into its characters’ world and ...
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