In what many call her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf creates a warm and intimate portrait of a family which resembles her own–her parents, brothers and sisters–and the friends with whom they enjoy their summer vacation on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides. Woolf’s own large family vacationed there for ten summers at Talland House, which looks out toward the lighthouse. In this novel, written in 1927, thirty years after she and her family vacationed there, Virginia Woolf sensitively recreates everyday life in a house similar to Talland. Here Virginia Woolf creates an impressionistic picture of life in the years before World War I. Taking a modernist approach, she has no primary narrator, instead slipping in and out of the minds of several characters as they think about life and observe life around them, her modified stream-of-consciousness allowing her to create a vibrant, free-flowing atmosphere which she peoples with unique characters who have revealed their innermost thoughts. The overall effect is powerful.
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The land of Mesopotamia, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, once boasted the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, among the Seven Wonders of the World. Highly developed ancient civilizations competed for power there four thousand years before Christ, leaving behind sites of immense archaeological importance as they defeated each other and formed new civilizations. In the modern era, Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq, fell under a succession of foreign rulers, and by 1914, when this novel opens, it was ruled from Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire, which was considered “the sick man of Europe” and ripe for overthrow. Iraq, a vast land of immense natural resources, is there for the picking– and it has no government of its own to interfere with potential exploitation by colonial powers. Virtually every country in Europe is on site, vying for oil, “the genie [that] will be the harbinger of a golden age,” and working to open the country to other business pursuits. Trying to ignore most of this turmoil is John Somerville, a thirty-five-year-old archaeologist who has been working for three years at Tell Erdek, an ancient site near Baghdad which has so far yielded little in terms of artifacts.
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Focusing on just two climactic years, 1913 – 1914, Frederic Morton recreates Vienna in all its splendor during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The vibrant social, intellectual, and cultural life of Vienna is examined within the context of the seething nationalism of the Balkans, the Machiavellian intrigue among the political rulers of the European nations and Russia, and the human frailties of the seemingly larger-than-life national leaders, which assure that the twilight of the empire will eventually be overtaken by darkness.
Rigorously selective in his choice of detail, Morton brings to life the varied activities of a broad cross-section of Viennese society, and reproduces the intellectual milieu which eventually leads to the rise of some of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century–Trotsky, Stalin, Adler, Freud, Jung, Lenin, Hitler, Tito, and a host of others, all of whom are part of Vienna life.
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Set in St. Petersburg in 1914, when revolution looms but chess tournaments play on, this exciting intellectual thriller traces the various forces contending for influence and power in the city–the municipal police, factory workers, students, the secret police, Bolsheviks, Polish terrorists, and czarists, among others, with the newspapers and their editors wishing to report the truth but wary of choosing the wrong side in the ultimate battle. A chess game, which plays throughout the novel, is a metaphor for the moves and countermoves among the contenders for power and among the lovers searching here for love. Most appropriately, both politics and love reach a state of “zugzwang,” that state in which one player is reduced to helplessness but obliged to move, with each move making the situation worse.
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James Harrison Stringer, now working as a detective for the North Eastern Company Railroad in York, England, has been fired from the job he’s loved—being “on the footplate” of a locomotive. He had wrecked a locomotive and its shed because of someone else’s failure. For Stringer, the world of trains has always been a world in which the power, movement, and downright excitement of being in the cab of a locomotive will never die. Now that he’s a detective, however, he does have a chance to work at the terminal and watch the various lines as they operate. When a hotel porter at the Station Hotel in York is found with his throat cut, and soon afterward the Cameron brothers, “Brilliantine” and “Crackpot,” whom Stringer has encountered in a snooker parlor, are found shot to death near the York goods yard, the seemingly quiet life off the footplate suddenly ratchets up. Stringer is asked by Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill to go out into the city and trace the “badlads” and those masterminds putting them up to crime, while engaging in a “double game” by participating in their gang and then reporting to Weatherill by post every day. Set in 1906, this is an absolute must for anyone who is a fan of early railroad lore!
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