This book is an omnibus of three novels. But they are often published together and so I feel justified in regarding it as ‘one’ book.
Every so often we discover a unique voice with a distinctive style that bowls us over. Henry Green has been a revelation to me. His novels are unusual and I can understand how they might be regarded as an acquired taste, but I immediately was captivated by the way he tells his stories. And they are hardly stories in the conventional sense. They are barrages of life, messy real life populated with characters who almost never know exactly what they are doing, or why.
These characters are so alive on the page that the reader forgets they are merely the author’s creations and when the author occasionally intrudes to make a remark about so-and-so’s behaviour or motivations, we shake our heads sadly because we feel the author is wrong and knows these characters less well than we do. It is a strange effect, a bracing one too. Rarely have I enjoyed fiction so much.
Henry Green explored class distinctions through the medium of love. This volume brings together three of his novels contrasting the lives of servants and masters (Loving); workers and owners, set in a Birmingham iron foundry (Living); and the different lives of the wealthy and the ordinary, (Party Going).
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and…
This charming and ingenious fantasy, beautifully illustrated by Moers, is not just a marvellous picaresque adventure on its own but it also feels like a repository of all fantastic images and ideas.
It seems to contain all other possible fantasy books within itself. There are monsters and quests and magicians and cancelled utopias and twisted fairytale romances. Bluebear rushes from one exploit to another, most of them potentially lethal, all of them amusing, and meets a host of peculiar, garrulous, friendly, treacherous beings.
It’s a large book but an easy one to read and yet it feels rich and profound despite the simple language that outlines the increasingly absurd circumstances surrounding the hero’s journey. Obstacles are overcome, minds are changed forever, coincidences proliferate, competence becomes a hindrance, geographies are sentient, cities soar into the skies, and Bluebear himself is always pleasant, optimistic, and devoted to the literary wellbeing of the enchanted reader.
Unlike cats, bluebears have 27 lives, which can be very handy when one considers the manner in which the hero of this story repeatedly manages to avoid death only by a paw's breadth. The story describes Captain Bluebear's first 13 and a half lives.
This is the best ‘last man on earth’ novel I have ever read. It’s a subgenre with a few classic titles to its credit, including M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. But Morselli’s book is neater, more concise, sharper in tone, and deeper in thought.
It’s a philosophical fable and reminds me, in terms of style, a little of Italo Calvino. But there is an attenuated bitterness in Morselli that seems especially suited to the theme of a solitary survivor living in a world where all other members of his species have evaporated in an instant. As time passes, this survivor begins to appreciate the renewal of nature that follows the disappearance of humanity.
It’s a short novel but dense with speculations that are both cerebral and emotional. Morselli was an unsuccessful writer while he was alive, unable to get any of his novels into print. All were published after his death. He is an author absolutely worth the effort of seeking out.
A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century.
From his solitary buen retiro in the mountains, the last man on earth drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if anyone else has survived the Vanishing. But there’s no one else, living or dead, in that city of “holy plutocracy,” with its fifty-six banks and as many churches. He’d left the metropolis to escape his fellow humans and their struggles and ambitions, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he…
In Wales it never stops raining. Or almost never. When it does stop raining from the sky, it rains from hearts instead. People huddle in the endless rain, and over time they have evolved into aquatic creatures who only look and behave like men and women but aren’t really. Wales is a nation with no spot of dry land within its borders. Wales is an Atlantis that never stayed under but is just as wet. Crammed with mythical beings and happenings, Cloud Farming in Wales palpitates, germinates, and extrapolates, but never evaporates, and the sodden heroes that wade and slosh through the mighty puddles of its pages are generally in search of a canoe.
