Hannah Gonen, a young woman living in Jerusalem in the late 1950s, has been married for ten years to a man she pursued and married when she was in her first year at the university and he was a graduate student. Michael, who describes himself to Hannah as “good…a bit lethargic, but hard-working, responsible, clean, and very honest,” eventually earns his PhD. degree in geology and begins work at the university, but Hannah, who has given up her literature studies upon her marriage, soon finds married life – and Michael himself – to be tedious. Her only child resembles Michael in personality, a child rooted in reality, who “finds objects much more interesting than people or words.” Writing in short, factual sentences, which come alive through his choice of details, author Amos Oz, often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, recreates Hannah’s story of her marriage, a marriage which may or may not survive.
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After an apprenticeship as a shipwright, William Adams takes to the sea in 1587, at age 23, commanding a supply ship carrying food and ammunition to the English fleet as it battles the Spanish Armada. A dozen years later he is commanding a ship going to the Spice Islands on a route around South America. At the end of nineteen catastrophic months, the 36-year-old Adams and twenty-four desperately ill and dying crew members arrive at the south end of Japan, the first Englishmen ever to do so. Giles MIlton writes an extremely readable, scholarly study of the opening (and in 1637, the closing) of Japan to western trade. Using many primary sources, Milton creates an exciting story of how Japan comes to be “discovered,” what its values and culture are, and why the intrusion of the west and the possibility of trade are eventually rebuffed. The contrasts Milton sets up throughout the biography attest to his appreciation of 17th century Japanese society and their superior “civilization” to that of the British at the time.
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Having won the Whitbread Award in 1989 for Gerontius, a literary novel about composer Sir Edward Elgar, James Hamilton-Paterson has written most recently in a completely different vein – three wild, off-the-wall novels starring Gerald Samper, an aesthete with a love for gourmet food, clothing, and cutting edge social commentary. Samper is, however, something of an ass, a man so self-absorbed and so convinced of the importance of his (as yet undiscovered) “mission” in life that he “lurches from crisis to crisis,” never pausing for reflection. Despite these unsympathetic qualities, however, Samper cannot help but amuse and intrigue readers as he involves us in his whirlwind activities and invites us to join him on the rollercoaster of his life. In this final novel in the series (though it is not necessary to have read the previous novels), Samper is working on an opera about the vision of Princess Diana he says he had just before his house fell down the mountain in a landslide. The resulting opera gives new meaning to the term “opera buffa.” Hilarious, irreverent.
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