Set in the USA, this novel looks at the developing climate emergency from the early 2020s to the mid 1940s and features a large cast of characters, whose stories interconnect in surprising ways. Although there are various plot twists and excitements, it’s all too believable - the scenarios we're warned of if various tipping points are reached affect everyday lives in dramatic ways. It's a marathon read at more than 800 pages, but I listened on Audible where it's narrated by a full cast, which kept me hooked throughout. The outlook is necessarily bleak, but Stephen Markley does manage to end the novel on a note of hope. This is definitely my book of the year.
"This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting." -Stephen King
From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.
In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become…
Derek Jarman's memoir immerses us in his world, or rather worlds - his life as a film-maker in London, and as an out gay man diagnosed with HIV at a time when that gave a grim outlook, and his other life at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness, where he enjoyed the complete contrast of quietness and often solitude. He says that in another life he could have been a gardener, and loves creating his iconic garden of pebbles, maritime plants and objects found on the shore. We go back and forth from childhood memories to the present, from accounts of making his films and being in the media spotlight to details of herbs and remedies. Derek Jarman is an engaging diarist, full of contradictions and charm.
Derek Jarman tells the story of his discovery that he is HIV+ and, in a series of flashbacks, looks at his life - his difficult relationship with his father, his discovery of his homosexuality and the dramatic exposure of his first homosexual relationship, his university days and his coming out at art school in the company of contemporaries such as David Hockney and Patrick Proctor. He goes on to describe his early work as a stage designer , his affair with Robert Mapplethorpe and his early encouragement of David Lynch. The cast list also includes Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Kenneth…
This epic novel of the voyages of the Beagle introduces us not only to the youthful Charles Darwin but also to the ship's brilliant but troubled captain, Robert Fitzroy. The relationship between the two men is at the heart of the novel - a close friendship based on mutual respect but one which becomes hostile as Darwin's observations shake his belief in God and in the stories of creation and of Noah's flood, while Fitzroy believes that Biblical accounts should not be questioned. It's exhilarating to see how the realisations that lead to Darwin's great breakthrough slowly come to him, while at the same time it's an exciting seafaring novel that provides enough dangers and challenges to satisfy readers who like action-packed plots. Sadly, this was Harry Thompson's only novel - he died soon after its completion at only 45 - but a powerfully impressive one.
This is an epic novel of sea-faring adventure set in the 19th century charting the life of Robert Fitzroy, the captain of 'The Beagle' and his passenger Charles Darwin. It combines adventrure, emotion, ideas, humour and tragedy as well as illuminating the history of the 19th century. Fitzroy, the Christian Tory aristocrat believed in the sanctity of the individual, but his beliefs destroyed his career and he committed suicide. Darwin, the liberal minor cleric doubts the truth of the Bible and develops his theory of evolution which is brutal and unforgiving in human terms. The two friends became bitter enemies…
A Victorian sensation novel with echoes of Wilkie Collins' No Name and The Woman in White. When Samuel Godwin, a young and naive art tutor, accepts a job with the Farrow family at Fourwinds, their majestic home, little does he expect to come across such a web of secrets and lies. His two tutees, though sisters, are very different from each other - the beautiful younger sister Marianne, full of flightiness and nervous imagination, and Juliana, controlled and sad. With their governess, Charlotte Agnew, Samuel begins to uncover slowly the horrifying truth behind Juliana's sadness and Marianne's emotional fragility, and the reason why one of the iconic Four Winds sculptures was never completed.
