The four novellas that make up this book share a common theme: deception and self-deception, practised by or on the protagonists. Each story is told in prose of great assurance, narrated by a brilliantly distinctive voice. The characters include an Anglo-Italian Professor of Semiotics, undone by his own cleverness; an Irishwoman who becomes a novice in a Tibetan nunnery in Nepal; a house party of old university friends that is galvanised by a pugnacious newcomer into a demented Buchanesque mission to restore their hostess's lost honour, and an international lawyer who takes to terrorism in pursuit of a theory. SEVERAL DECEPTIONS is clever, funny, a little cruel. It introduces a writer of quite remarkable gifts.

Several Deceptions

Literature & Fiction

Jane Stevenson

Contemporary

Vintage

London Bridges, her first novel, evokes the mood and sheer enjoyability of classic English detective fiction, though it is set in the London of the 1990s. A young lawyer comes across a treasure lost in the Blitz, and is tempted into a series of crimes which end eventually in murder. Meanwhile, a very contemporary cast of characters assembles to confound him. The denouncement of the intricate plot occurs in the Cotswolds, and involves teddy bears, Greek monks, New Age bikers and the source of the Thames, but before we get there, there is humour, satire, social observation, occasional moments of paths, and the scintillating wit and intelligence that distinguished Several Deceptions.

London Bridges

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random

Good Women

Vintage Books

Language:Chinese.Paperback. Pub Date: November 2008 Pages: 512 in Publisher: Pimlico Edward Burra never followed the fashion: in the thirties. when modern art was dominated by abstraction and landscape. he painted people; in the sixties. when landscape was completely out of fashion. he started to find it interesting. His life was an unusual one: profoundly disabled. he lived with his parents. and was in constant pain. Only when he was painting could he forget his body. At the same time he was a man with a rich and full life. He was a letter-writer of genius. writing every afternoon to a wide circle of friends. His letters are camp. witty. full of the energy and delight in life which he could not express physically. Inventive. entertaining. and extraordinarily original. his writing expresses a man who combined profound personal loyalty with distaste for any kind of emotional ...

EDWARD BURRA

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Pimlico

The Pretender

The pretender

JONATHAN CAPE.

Edward Burra: Twentieth-century Eye

Biographies & Memoirs

A New York Times Editor's ChoiceAn immensely moving account of a strange and magical interracial love affair, The Winter Queen illuminates the Netherlands of the seventeenth century. Amid the dark ambiance of the time, the exiled Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia and Pelagius, a West African prince and former slave, fall in love and secretly marry. Jane Stevenson vividly renders both a portrait of an extraordinary relationship and a tumultuous political history.

The Winter Queen

Wheeler Publishing

Sequel to The Winter QueenA New York Times Editor's ChoiceSet in seventeenth-century Holland, Restoration London, and Barbados, this is the second volume of Jane Stevenson's masterly historical trilogy. The Winter Queen, the acclaimed first volume, told of the mature passion of Elizabeth of Bohemia and her clandestine lover, an African prince and former slave. Now Balthasar Stuart, the secret child born of their love, struggles to come to terms with his rich, difficult, and complex heritage.

The Shadow King

An authoritative, richly illustrated history, and affectionate celebration, of Siena, one of the best-loved and most-visited cities in Italy.\nOccupying a hilltop site in the midst of a vast, undulating landscape – between the wine-producing region of Chianti to the north and the truffle-filled woods of the Crete Senesi to the south – Siena is as much a magnet for contemporary tourism as Florence.\nHowever, its proud republican past presents an intriguing contrast with its Medici-dominated northern Tuscan rival, with which it tussled for local supremacy for much of the High Middle Ages. From the twelfth century, profiting from its advantageous position on a major pilgrim route, the Republic of Siena developed into a major European power and remained an important commercial, financial and artistic centre for four centuries.\nJane Stevenson tells the story of how the city rose to its astonishingly productive cultural heyday in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries before suffering a catastrophic late medieval decline in the aftermath of the Black Death. But she also reveals how it transcended this early loss of power to enjoy a prosperous civic afterlife and cherished position as a uniquely well-preserved medieval city, crammed with world-class art and architecture, furnished with appealing and intriguing traditions, and set in a heavenly landscape.

SIENA

Travel

Europe

Apollo

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Books by Jane Stevenson