Using documents and photographs that have never before been available, along with private diaries and interviews with some of those who knew the subject, Idina Sackville, author Frances Osborne creates a lively, readable, and well researched biography which attempts to understand what aspects of her early family life might have helped create a person so flamboyant, sexually adventurous, and hedonistic that she became world famous, just for being who she was. The author has special reason to ponder this subject. When she was thirteen, The Sunday Times began a serialization of James Fox’s White Mischief, a detailed account of Happy Valley and the British aristocrats who had participated in the “mischief” in Kenya. Frances and her twelve-year-old sister Kate devoured each installment as it came out. “Was this the secret to being irresistible to men,” she wondered, “to behave as this woman did, while ‘walking barefoot at every available opportunity’ as well as being ‘intelligent, well-read, enlivening company’?” One afternoon, with a twinkle in his eye, her father told his embarrassed wife Davina that it was time for her to come clean. Davina had to admit to her daughters that she was the granddaughter of Idina Sackville, and they themselves were Idina’s great-granddaughters.
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Martin Scobie, David Hughes, and Fred Privett, all age eighty-five, have just been admitted to the nursing home of St. Christopher and St. Jude following the bizarre crash of their three ambulances at the intersection in front of the facility. Admitted for their recuperation, they must share a small single room in which the light switch can only be reached by leaning across one bed. Some furniture has been removed to accommodate the extra beds, and the wardrobe, blocking a window, is inaccessible because of the third bed. Even if they had a view through that window, however, their accommodations would not be much improved. “Immediately outside the window was a mass of dusty green foliage of the kind which grows outside kitchens and hotel toilets…The leaves, moving in endless trembling toward and away from one another, gave an impression of trying to speak or to listen but always turning away before any tiny message could either be given or heard,” a detail emblematic of all life at this nursing home, which specializes in non-communication, not just between staff and patients, but between staff and each other, and among the patients themselves. As Australian author Elizabeth Jolley develops this relentlessly dark-humored and totally absorbing novel, she also displays enormous talent for developing sensitive character sketches of the elderly patients. Jolley is a world class author, capable of creating serious questions and developing the biggest of the world’s themes within small settings and scenes, and I can hardly wait to read the next book being released, MISS PEABODY’S INHERITANCE. She is a new Favorite!
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Those who have loved author Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1970 ) will undoubtedly be fascinated also by Angel (1957). Angel, less subtle in its black humor and obvious satire, will strike chords among all writers and lovers of writing who have ever, in their wildest imaginations, fantasized about producing a blockbuster novel, or even a moderately successful one. In 1900, Angel Deverell, fifteen, lives with her mother above the family grocery store in Norley. Emotionally, however, she lives on a completely different plane, imagining a life in which she is elegant, successful, admired by all, and, of course, wealthy beyond her most fervent dreams. Humiliated at school for something she has said, she announces that she will never return again to school. Instead she will finish writing a romantic novel, The Lady Urania, set at “Haven Castle,” a project on which she works almost around the clock, and she is sure it will be a success. Despite her age, it is HUGE, and Angel’s life and the lives of her family are never the same–and obviously, not always in a good way.
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Revealing the final days of Alice Valentine, a former headmistress who is being attended by her sons and closest friends, Andrew Miller’s thoughtful novel Oxygen remains remarkably hopeful, never descending into the bathos of so many other end-of-life novels. Alice’s dying, though realistically described, becomes, in fact, the fulcrum upon which the novel studies three other characters as they gain new insights into their own lives. All of them have some “unfinished business” with which they have not come to terms, and as these characters focus their attention on Alice, while reminiscing privately about their own pasts, the novel goes far beyond the customary focus on the meaning of life and death to include each character’s secret failures, the guilt accompanying these, the nature of true happiness, what it requires to become a “successful” human being. Ultimately, Miller’s characters ask “Who are we?” Despite its complex, seemingly depressing subject, the novel is actually thrilling to read, in part because of Andrew Miller’s skill as a novelist. One of the clearest, cleanest writers in the world today, Miller chooses exactly the right word to meld perfect images with universal themes in new ways.
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An author revered as much for the controlled lyricism of his prose as for his careful attention to details of the natural world, his uncompromising characterizations, and his ability to incorporate subtle symbols, Swiss author Jacques Chessex (1934 – 2009) was the first foreign citizen to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. In this dramatic novel, he tells the story of Jean Calmet, a thirty-eight-year-old schoolteacher, whose physician father has just died and with whom he has had a fraught relationship. The youngest of five children, Jean both loved and feared his father, with good reason, and he is glad that his father has been cremated, rather than buried. “The doctor would be reduced to ashes. He could not be allowed any chance of keeping his exasperating, scandalous vigour in the fertile earth,” Jean thinks. “Make a little heap of ashes of him, ashes at the bottom of an urn. Like sand. Anonymous, mute dust.” As the family gathers to choose an urn, Jean meditates on his father’s relationships with the whole family, and especially on his own chances for a life of his own. With no emotional resources of his own to sustain him, even by the age of thirty-eight, he is a completely lost soul, someone ready to become a victim of others, if not himself.
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