Disturbing revelations of the past and present merge when twenty years after abandoning India, Rupert, his father, and his father's sensual young bride return to visit the grave of Rupert's mother, who had died there at a tragically young age

Frozen Music (The Harper Short Novel Series)

Francis King

Literature & Fiction

Harper Row Publishers

The steamy squalor of modern India and a twenty-year-old mystery surrounding a young woman's death provide the setting for this brilliantly deceptive story about a genteel old man, his sensual young bride, and his brooding son. Twenty years after they let it, Rupert and his father Philip, accompanied by Philip's young wife Kirsti and their chauffeur Rajiv, return to India to make peace with their past. The little troupe proceeds by car through the bleak industrial suburbs of town they no longer recognize, a tour whose ultimate stop will be a visit to the grave of Rupert's mother. The heat and dust, the poverty of the peasants, and the hostility of the merchants all create a feeling of oppression that heightens the sense of loss felt by father and son. But beneath the surface there is another source of tension among the group of travellers-the barely suppressed sexual attraction Rupert feels toward his father's wife, in counterpoint to his growing sense of betrayal as recollections of the past, and of the mother who died when he was so young, accumulate. Through Rupert's point of view we see his father as frail, politely ineffectual, even a bit dotty-until the gradual revelations of the past merge with those of the present, and Philip reveals his own complex truth in the novel's surprising and powerful climax.

Frozen Music

Contemporary

Hutchinson

Yesterday Came Suddenly (Biography and Memoirs)

Biographies & Memoirs

Constable and Company Ltd.

Domestic Animal

Literary

Arrow Books

To the dark tower

Was it simply, in the coroner's words, a stupid and tragic accident? Sybil Crawford would never have expected her brother, Hugo, to die like that, so suddenly, in a fall from the balcony of a Brighton hotel. The handsome, intelligent headmistress of a girls' school on the south coast, Sybil is not alone in desperately wanting 'but two hours converse with the dead'. Lavinia Trent, the well-known actress, and Bridget Nagel, whose journalist husband was killed in the Falklands, are equally ready to enter the bizarre, comic, unnerving world of paranormal experiment. 'Gripping entertainment from start to finish' Listener 'False trail follows false trail; the curtain is tantalizingly lifted and then, again, lowered' ... King is now writing at the height of his powers' Spectator 'His most masterful, comic and moving novel yet' Financial Times

Voices in an Empty Room

Penguin??Books

Techniques of High Magic

stephen-skinner

Warner

The Rebirth of Magic

Religion & Spirituality

Isabel Sutherland

Occult & Paranormal

Corgi Books

The Last Of The Pleasure Gardens

London: Panther Books

Act of Darkness

Pocket

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Books by Francis King