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At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward
Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy
landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily,
who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion
gradually freezing into rigid widowhood. A hundred years later, on
a sweltering mid-summer's day, Edward's great-grand-niece Julia
moves through the old family house, attempting to impose some order
on the clutter of inherited belongings and memories from that
ill-fated expedition, and taking care to ignore the deepening
cracks within her own marriage. But as afternoon turns into
evening, Julia makes a discovery that splinters her long-held image
of Edward and Emily's romance, and her husband Simon faces a
precipitous choice that will decide the future of their
relationship. Sharply observed and deeply engaging, The Still Point
is a powerful literary debut and a moving meditation on the
distances - geographical and emotional - that can exist between two
people.
This is a portrait of Diego Velazquez, from his arrival at the
court of King Philip IV of Spain, to his death 38 years and scores
of paintings later. It is a portrait of a relationship that is not
quite a friendship, between an artist and his subject. It is a
portrait of a ruler, always on duty, and increasingly burdened by a
life of public expectation and repeated private grief. And it is a
portrait of a court collapsing under the weight of its own excess.
Unfolding through series of masterly set-pieces and glancing
sketches, this is a novel of brilliance, imagination and sheer
style -- about what is shown and what is seen, about art and life.
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Orkney (Paperback)
Amy Sackville
1
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R279
R248
Discovery Miles 2 480
Save R31 (11%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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On a remote island in Orkney, a curiously matched couple arrive on
their honeymoon. He is an eminent literature professor; she was his
pale, enigmatic star pupil. Alone beneath the shifting skies of
this untethered landscape, the professor realises how little he
knows about his new bride and yet, as the days go by and his mind
turns obsessively upon the creature who has so beguiled him, she
seems to slip ever further from his yearning grasp. Where does she
come from? Why did she ask him to bring her north? What is it that
constantly draws her to the sea?
Seventy years after the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention,
the UK is guilty of undermining the very principles of asylum,
inhumanely detaining those seeking protection and ushering in
sweeping changes that threaten to punish refugees at every turn.
But the UK’s immigration system is not alone in committing such
breaches of human rights. The fourth volume of Refugee Tales
explores our present international environment, combining author
re-tellings with first-hand accounts of individuals who have been
detained across the world. As the coronavirus pandemic defies
borders – leaving those who are detained even more vulnerable –
this collection shares stories spanning Canada, Greece, Italy,
Switzerland and the UK, and calls for international insistence on a
future without detention. Featuring a prologue by Baroness Shami
Chakrabarti. The fourth volume in the Refugee Tales series,
proceeds from the sales of which go to two refugee charities.
"A haunting novel" about sex and obsession, set off the coast of
Scotland and "full of otherworldly emotion and strange impulses"
(Marie Claire). A professor marries his prize student, a woman
forty years his junior, and at her request, he takes her to the sea
for their honeymoon. His life's work is a book about
enchantment-narratives in literature, most of them involving
strange girls and women--but soon he finds himself distracted by
his own enchantment with his new white-haired young wife. They
travel to the Orkney Islands, the ancient Mesolithic and Neolithic
site north of the Scottish coast, a barren place of extraordinary
beauty known as "the Seal Islands." And as the days of their
honeymoon pass, his desire and his constant, yearning contemplation
become his normality. His mysterious bride becomes his entire
universe. He is consumed . . . From the author of The Still Point,
a winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, this is a novel
that "will appeal to literature aficionados: a Lolita-esque love, a
romance born out of academia, and folklore come to life"
(Booklist). "What begins as a familiar, almost fairytale-like
narrative ends as something more fragmented, unsettling, and odd .
. . Providing a brooding, bruised, ever-changing backdrop to all
this is Orkney, the book's most compelling character of all. In a
tribute to Virginia Woolf's experimental masterpiece, The Waves,
the sea in Orkney functions as a kind of rhythmic talisman, its ebb
and flow mirrored in the actions, ideas, and themes of the book.
More than anything, Sackville's Orkney is a breathtaking place in
the most literal of senses." --The Scotsman
At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward
Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy
landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily,
who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion
gradually freezing into rigid widowhood.
A hundred years later, on a sweltering mid-summer's day, Edward's
great-grand-niece Julia moves through the old family house,
attempting to impose some order on the clutter of inherited
belongings and memories from that ill-fated expedition, and taking
care to ignore the deepening cracks within her own marriage. But as
afternoon turns into evening, Julia makes a discovery that
splinters her long-held image of Edward and Emily's romance.
The Still Point moves through past, present, and future, with
dreams revealing a universal simultaneity to the choices we must
all make in the faces of love and passion. Long-listed for the
Orange Prize, The Still Point is a powerful literary debut,
masterfully told in the language of the heart.
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