An extended Anglo-Irish family living in the vicinity of Dublin on the eve of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 reflects the attitudes and pressures that lead eventually to the cataclysmic events at the Dublin Post Office. Andrew Chase-White, a young officer in the British Cavalry, has been assigned to Dublin, where he has often spent holidays and where he has an almost-fiancee. His idolized cousin Patrick Dumay, “the iron man,” is secretly a member of the Irish Volunteers and an admirer of Padraig Pearse. His teenaged cousin, hot-headed Cathal, supports the Citizen’s Army under James Connolly. As the action unfolds throughout the week leading to the uprising, the family interacts on several levels, revealing their mores, their dreams for the future of Ireland, their occasional tendency to look for religious significance in political destiny, and their personal hopes and failings.
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Published by Random House of South Africa, The Hero of Currie Road presents two kinds of stories. About half of them are about individual boys under Alan Paton’s care at the reformatory–sensitive and insightful tales about young teenagers at crossroads, often inspired to lead honorable lives but without the ability, always, to make the right choices. The second group of stories is about the white world, mostly adults, who reflect the ingrained attitudes of apartheid which have permanently limited the attitudes, aspirations, and achievements of the native majority population–and which Paton sometimes despairs of ever changing. All the stories from his first collection, Debbie Go Home (known as Tales from a Trouble Land in the US), from 1961, are included here, as are the stories from his 1975 collection, Knocking on the Door. Together they show Alan Paton in his most personal, most revealing moments, in which he frankly states opinions that he cannot make in his novels, a form for which “the inexorable rule is that you must put your story first, not your politics or religion or your anger about the Group Areas Act.” (To read the entire review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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Sly and subtle, this comic novel by one of England’s most under-recognized novelists depicts the life of its main character so poignantly that readers will find themselves as close to tears as they may be to chuckles. Mildred Lathbury, at thirty-one, already regards herself as a spinster, a woman who has completely repressed her inner self so that she can lead an “excellent” life. Working for the Society for the Care for Aged Gentlewomen during the day, she also helps Fr. Julian Malory and his sister Winifred at the rectory and in church during her spare time. Except for these activities and a few outings with similarly “excellent” single women, she has no social life, except for her once-a-year dinner date with a male friend. Set in 1952, the novel follows the life of Mildred as it suddenly becomes a bit more “exciting,” at least by Mildred’s standards. A married couple, the Napiers, move into the house where she lives, and she makes an effort to get to know them. Rockingham Lathbury (Rocky) has been an officer (and playboy) in Italy during the war; his wife Helena is an anthropologist who has been working on a project in Africa with a male anthropologist, Everard Bone. It quickly becomes clear that the marriage is having problems, and Mildred gets drawn in. (To see the full review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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Mary Renault’s great Greek novel early Greek history/mythology begins when Theseus, the mythical founder of Athens is a young man in Troizen, a well-bred youth who has never known his father’s identity. When, with the help of the gods, he succeeds in lifting a stone to reclaim his father’s sword, Theseus discovers that he is the son of Aigeus, King of Athens. On his way to Athens to meet him, Theseus arrives in Eleusis, where after wrestling the king in a fight to the death, he finds himself, unexpectedly, the King of Eleusis. Later, in Athens, when fourteen young men and women are chosen by lot to become bull-dancers in Crete, fulfilling a tribute demanded by the King of Crete, Theseus listens to his god and joins the group, never knowing if he will survive to return to his father. Renault tells the story of Theseus as if Theseus were a real person, not a mythical character, using history, archaeology, and a deep understanding of the cultures of the period to place Theseus in a realistic context. Her descriptions of the lifting of the stone, the wrestling match in Eleusis, Theseus’s arrival at the palace in Athens, and especially his experiences in becoming a bull dancer bring the period vibrantly to life in ways consistent with the historical record. (To see the entire review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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This is a masterpiece to be savored, celebrated, and shared. Straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Radetzky March uniquely combines the color, pomp, pageantry, and military maneuvering of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the more modern political and psychological insights of the twentieth century, giving this short book a panoramic geographical and historical scope with fully rounded characters you can truly feel for. Following the fortunes of three generations of the Trotta family, the novel opens with the story of the grandfather, whose battlefield actions in the mid-nineteenth century save the life of the man who becomes Emperor Franz Josef. He is well rewarded by the emperor, and his son and grandson remain connected with the leaders of the country and benefit from this relationship. Atmospheric effects are so rich and details are so carefully selected that you can hear the clopping of hooves, rattling of carriage wheels, clang of sabers, and percussion of rifles. Parallels between the actions of man and actions of Nature, along with seasonal cycles, bird imagery, and farm activity, permeate the book, grounding it and connecting the author’s view of empire to the reality of the land.
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