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'Her best novel yet' The Times 'Incredibly compelling' Daily Mail
'Incandescent'The Observer Two parents stand by powerlessly as
their only child seems intent on destroying herself. Meanwhile the
mother - a novelist - attempts to understand her uneasy, unresolved
relationship with her own mother. Weaving between childhoods past
and present, as well as a current narrative laced with temptation
and betrayal, this is the delicate journey of a mother, daughter,
wife and author struggling to make sense of her world. But can a
writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story? Clear-eyed,
self-lacerating and at times frighteningly direct, Julie Myerson's
latest novel explores maternal love as the emotional foundation we
both crave and fear. A howl of fury, as well as a moving love
letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a book about damage,
addiction, recovery and creativity.
From the author of Me and the Fat Man and Home comes a gripping
historical novel set in Victorian London. This is a tale of murder
and love – and the tragic extremes of loss and need. On a humid,
thundery afternoon, Laura commits an appalling act – the murder
of her husband. But is it so appalling to free yourself, to run
after the only passion you’ve ever known? It is Billy who has to
find an answer – Billy, fifteen years younger than her and
already a father of five. But what he doesn’t know yet is that
Laura also had a child, a child she gave up to the Foundling
Hospital and whose memory will shape their future together in
unimaginable ways. Julie Myerson’s new novel moves through a
Victorian London which is tender, murky and unsettling. A
spectacularly eerie and unforgettable love story.
Myerson's third novel, her most uninhibited and powerful, is Amy's
story - a journey of sexual desire and her strange relationship
with the fat man who rescues her from the past. Amy is a waitress
living in Bath. She is married but she also finds men from the
park, gives them sex for money and pays it straight into
Nationwide. And then the mysterious Harris arrives in the
restaurant one day; he knew Amy's mother, who drowned in the Aegean
when Amy was just a young girl. Amy is confused but intrigued when
Harris demands that she meets his friend Gary, a young fat man he
shares a flat with. It is the beginning of a strange relationship
that will take them back to Greece, where the past - and all its
dark secrets - is confronted. Amy's story is so compulsive and
frightening that it is impossible to put down. It is told in a
spare and hypnotic prose that will leave you enchanted. Me and the
Fat Man establishes this highly acclaimed writer as one of the
finest novelists at work today.
The Restoration Court knows Lady Dona St Columb to be ripe for any
folly, any outrage that will alter the tedium of her days. But
there is another, secret Dona who longs for freedom, honest love -
and sweetness, even if it is spiced with danger. To escape the
shallowness of court life, Dona retreats to Navron, her husband's
remote Cornish estate. There, she seeks peace in its solitary woods
and hidden creeks. But she finds instead a daring pirate, hunted by
all Cornwall, a Frenchman who, like Dona, would gamble his life for
a moment's joy. Together, they embark upon a quest rife with danger
and glory, one which bestows upon Dona the ultimate choice:
sacrifice her lover to certain death or risk her own life to save
him.
Ever thought about all the people who lived in your house before
you? Julie Myerson did, and set out to learn as much as she could
about their fascinating lives. This is the biography of a house,
the history of a home. It's an ordinary house, an ordinary home,
and ordinary people have lived there for over a century. But start
to explore who they were, what they believed in, what they desired
and they soon become as remarkable, as complicated and as
fascinating as anyone. That is exactly what Julie Myerson set out
to do. She lives in a typical Victorian terraced family house, of
average size, in a typical Victorian suburb (Clapham) and she loves
it. She wanted to find out how much those who preceded her loved
living there, so she spent hours and hours in the archives at the
Family Record Office, the Public Record Office at Kew, local
council archives and libraries across the country. Like an
archaeologist, she found herself blowing the dust off files that
no-one had touched since the last sheet of paper in them was typed.
As she scraped the years away, underneath she found herself
embroiled in a detective hunt as, bit by bit, she started to piece
together the story of her house, built in 1877, as told by its
former occupants in their own words and deeds. And so she met the
bigamist, the Tottenham Hotspur fanatic, the Royal servant, the
Jamaican family and all the rest of the eccentric and entertaining
former occupants of 34 Lillieshall Road. The book uncovers a lost
130-year history of happiness and grief, change and prudence,
poverty and affluence, social upheaval and technological advance.
Most of us are dimly aware that we are not the first person to turn
a key in our front door lock, yet we rarely confront the shadows
that inhabit our homes. But once you do - and Julie Myerson shows
you how - you will never bear to part from their company again.
This is your home's story too.
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Julius (Paperback, New edition)
Daphne Du Maurier; Introduction by Julie Myerson
1
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R285
R233
Discovery Miles 2 330
Save R52 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky. The
white clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold
and to caress, strange-moving things belonging to the wide blue
space of heaven . . . ' Julius Levy grows up in a peasant family in
a village on the banks of the Seine. A quick-witted urchin caught
up in the Franco-Prussian War, he is soon forced by tragedy to
escape to Algeria. Once there, he learns the ease of swindling, the
rewards of love affairs and the value of secrecy. Before he's
twenty, he is in London, where his empire-building begins in
earnest, and he becomes a rich and very ruthless man. Throughout
his life, Julius is driven by a hunger for power, his one weakness
his daughter, Gabriel . . . A chilling story of ambition, Daphne du
Maurier's third novel has lost none of its ability to unsettle and
disturb.
When people play the game: Name three or four persons whom you
would choose to have with you on a desert island -- they never
choose the Delaneys. They don't even choose us one by one as
individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the
reputation of being difficult guests ...' Maria, Niall and Celia
have grown up in the shadow of their famous parents - their father,
a flamboyant singer and their mother, a talented dancer. Now
pursuing their own creative dreams, all three siblings feel an
undeniable bond, but it is Maria and Niall who share the secret of
their parents' pasts. Alternately comic and poignant, The Parasites
is based on the artistic milieu its author knew best, and draws the
reader effortlessly into that magical world.
'Her best novel yet' The Times 'Incandescent' The Observer Two
parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on
destroying herself. Meanwhile the mother - a novelist - attempts to
understand her uneasy, unresolved relationship with her own mother.
Weaving between childhoods past and present, as well as a current
narrative laced with temptation and betrayal, this is the delicate
journey of a mother, daughter, wife and author struggling to make
sense of her world. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth
of her own story? Clear-eyed, self-lacerating and at times
frighteningly direct, Julie Myerson's latest novel explores
maternal love as the emotional foundation we both crave and fear. A
howl of fury, as well as a moving love letter from a mother to a
daughter, this is a book about damage, addiction, recovery and
creativity. 'I wolfed it all down - it's just so incredibly
compelling' Daily Mail 'Glitteringly painful' Rachel Cusk 'A
compulsive read. Searingly honest and raw' Deborah Moggach
'Urgent and vivid A serious, writerly, self-critical account of
what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good
intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you
bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you. Which
is not the same thing as saying that it is the complete truth. Art
can only ever hope to present a version of the truth. And this is
what Julie Myerson has done' Daily Telegraph 'An aching, empty-nest
memoir: a mother mourning for her uncomplicated little children,
now grown, whom she could care for, write about without comeback,
love - and control'The Times Myerson's motivation is anything but
base. She could have disguised her material in a novel, but she
wanted to make sense of reality, to understand the chaos that has
taken over her family. She wanted to help others, herself and her
son Any family for whom cannabis has been a wrecker, even if they
would not dream of exposing their situation in the same way Myerson
has, will be grateful to her for having done so. She may have been
rash, but she has also been courageous. She has tried to write
honestly about a nightmarish situation and a subject that never
seems to get the attention it deserves' Observer 'Yelloly, however
ephemeral, fulfils a function - she is a lost girl, one who cannot
be revived, from a family ravaged by that Victorian scourge,
consumption. And Myerson's real, parallel lament is for a child who
falls victim to our modern version of consumption - the slow
ruination of a much-loved child through drugs gripping' Financial
Times 'A campaigning book If the question is whether a woman has a
right to tell a story that is also, actually, her own - a book
reviewer can only say yes. And add that anyone who reads it will
struggle not to be profoundly moved' Independent
On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a
woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects, she was
not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving,
bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her.
Something Might Happen is not a murder mystery. There are clues,
false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit,
but Myerson's concern is with the effect of the murder on an
ordinary community and specifically on Tess herself, her husband
Mick and her three children. As the police go about their routine
investigation, Tess's world of nappies, school runs and baked beans
begins to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes
charged with significance, established relationships begin to
crumble and places that once were safe are safe no longer.
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