I am fascinated by the question, “Where is home?” Is it the place you were born, among the people who raised you? Or is it the place you most come alive? Growing up, fiction taught me there were other worlds than the one I inhabited, and historical fiction taught me how they came to be. Travels in England, Europe, Africa, and South America opened up worlds and cultures I had only read about and drove me to write a novel about how one may find "home" in the most unlikely times and places.
This is the story of Alice George, and her life among the Tuareg, a tribe of nomadic warriors. While the outside world endured the catastrophe of World War I, the Tuareg continued to crisscross the Sahara as they always had. A matrilineal society in which the men are veiled and the women hold property, it was a world well-suited to Alice, who discovers a life she never could have lived in corseted England.
In 1917, Alice returned home to England. Her silence about her life in the desert is finally broken five decades later when she receives a telegram announcing Abu has died in the desert. “Who is Abu?” her husband asks. “My lover,” she replies. Thus begins a weeklong journey of revelation as Alice lays bare her secrets.
I loved following these characters from an improbable birth in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to the world of medicine in New York and back.
I learned about a time and place that never appeared in my history texts and about how that history and landscape impacted and illuminated the main character. I was riveted through all 667 pages.
My brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths in the thick air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia. Bound by birth, we were driven apart by bitter betrayal. No surgeon can heal the would that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the beginning...
I read my fair share of Shakespeare in school and learned that he left his "second best bed" to his wife, but nothing prepared me for the reality of the Black Death, his life as a young Latin tutor who fell in love with an older woman, and the loss of his son. I love O’Farrell’s writing, beautiful atmospheric prose, and a deep study of what can fracture a family.
WINNER OF THE 2020 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION - THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER 2021 'Richly sensuous... something special' The Sunday Times 'A thing of shimmering wonder' David Mitchell
TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
I am fascinated by stories that encapsulate a whole life, usually from the perspective of a character looking back, assessing, wondering, and coming to terms with all that has transpired, both personally and globally. I am particularly fascinated by multi-dimensional female characters.
I was taken from page one by how well this story transitioned through different perspectives to offer a kaleidoscopic view of a life lived by a strong, unapologetic, complicated woman.
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.
I put aside the book I was reading at the time to live within this book as long as I could.
I thought I knew about the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the events that led to the uprisings in Chile in the 1970s, but one really doesn’t understand world events until one experiences them through the lives of those (fictional or real) who endured them.
In this story of an unlikely marriage, I learned once again that love is how we survive.
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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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'A powerful love story spanning generations... Full of ambition and humanity' - Sunday Times
'One of the strongest and most affecting works in Allende's long career' - New York Times Book Review
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On September 3, 1939, the day of the Spanish exiles' splendid arrival in Chile, the Second World War broke out in Europe.
Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever changed. Together with…
I read this book under the covers with a flashlight when I was probably too young to know what I was really reading. Still, I was deeply impacted by the story of these early settlers in the American West.
Although today I read it with a greater awareness of the history of the native people of that land, I am still stunned by the description of a seemingly one-dimensional but beautiful landscape and the world we most often now "fly over."
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our history through the words of the exceptional few.
My Antonia, a novel by Willa Cather, tells the story of friendship between Antonia Shimerda a young woman who moves to…
The Pact is a contemporary fiction novel about Australian sisters, Samantha and Annie, who are doubles tennis champions. This story amplifies the usual sibling issues and explores their professional partnership and personal relationships – similarities, differences, motivation, competition, abandonment, and grief – and how they each respond to the stress of constantly being under the media spotlight.
What happens when, at the pinnacle of fame, it all falls apart?
With dreams shattered and egos destroyed, how do they cope?
I have an older sister and although our rapport isn’t as dramatic, or as close, for that matter, I was able…
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