Author Alix Nathan discovered an advertisement in a 1797 publication: A scientist offered a reward of 50 pounds a year for life to a man who would live alone in an underground bunker for seven years.
As a writer, I was intrigued: How would the author portray the man who would propose such an experiment, and who in the world would subject himself to it? Nathan’s scientist is himself a social misfit, and the man who comes forward for his experiment is a poor laborer.
Some say that writing spoils one for reading, and I constantly find myself trying to dissect how the writer works her magic. But I was so absorbed in The Warlow Experiment that I forgot to engage in this writerly analysis. It is a truly fascinating read.
A Sunday Times fiction book of the year 'She is an original, with a virtuoso touch' - Hilary Mantel 'An extraordinary, quite brilliant book' - C. J. Sansom 'A powerful and unsettling novel' - Andrew Taylor
The year is 1793 and Herbert Powyss is set on making his name as a scientist. Determined to study the effects of prolonged solitude on another human being, he advertises for someone willing to live in his cellar for seven years in return for a generous financial reward. The only man to apply is John Warlow, a semi-literate farm labourer with a wife and…
Alice Winn writes with great tenderness and depth of understanding about two young men who fall in love against the backdrop of the Great War.
As a lesbian who struggled in my youthful years with coming out and finding my place in the world, I resonated with the shame, trepidation, and ambivalence these men experienced.
I love to support authors who grapple with the difficult questions around acceptance of gays and lesbians, and I applaud Alice Winn for the heartfelt story she tells in this novel.
Penelope Lively won the Booker Prize in 1987 for this novel, but I’m glad I finally discovered it.
I lost my mother a few years earlier and found myself reflecting on decline and death, which Lively explores through one Claudia Hampton. Claudia knows she’s dying, and she and the important people in her world look back at their relationships and foibles in a swirling timeline.
Claudia is a strong, sometimes abrasive, woman, but she has an unswerving eye. She helped me understand how, even though each person is bound by their own idiosyncratic perspective, “We all survive in the heads of others.” As my mother always will in mine.
Claudia Hampton is dying. As memories crowd in, she re-creates the mosiac of her life, her own story enmeshed with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the centre of her life, Tom, her one great love both found and lost in the "mad fairyland" of war-torn Egypt.
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II. Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini’s Italy, she courts danger every step of the way. As the war enters its final stages, she faces off against the most brutal of forces–Germany’s Intelligence Service, the Abwehr.
