Descend Again

Literature & Fiction

Burroway, Janet

Literary

Michael Walmer

Leone Leoni

SAND, GEORGE

Romance

One of Cleopatra's Nights (Zephyr Books)

GAUTIER, Théophile

Gösta Berling is a failed parson in nineteenth century rural Sweden, too fond of pleasure and the drink, torn by conflicting aims — the charm and deceit, love and laziness in him fighting for supremacy. He teams together with a group of sometimes dissolute, often well-meaning freemen of their district to evict the seemingly mad owner of a great rambling house at the centre of its own semi-feudal estate, Ekeby. This group call themselves the cavaliers.In her telling of what happens next, Lagerlöf creates a strange fusion between the realism of authors like Ibsen and Strindberg and the mythic force of the Scandinavian sagas. Gösta’s great loves, his enemies, those to whom he teaches lessons about life, either intentionally or accidentally, and others whose stories he has only a small part in, all start up from the page into a strange, elemental clarity, creating a sprawling mosaic of romance and realism.This first novel from the deeply original mind of the 1909 Nobel Prize winner weaves a balance between everyday rural reality and underlying dreams and fable to create a patchwork of extraordinary complexity and looming fascination, in which the reader can detect the author’s passion for the stories of her country, and her sceptical warmth for the troubled human spirit.

Gosta Berling's Saga

Lagerlöf, Selma

It is the late 1920s, and beautiful young Eve Wentworth is in a sticky situation. Both Harold and Hubert have asked her to marry them, and her inability to decide on either of them speaks volumes.Then Hugh Erskine, her sister Serena's husband, receives a letter from Jeremy Vaughan, a young family friend. He invites all three of them to join him on a tour of the Nile, sailing on a traditional dahabeah, but with all the mod cons of course. It seems the perfect solution to Eve's dilemma, and a delightful escape into the bargain.But things turn out to be not quite so simple. Eve has always liked Jeremy; she's known him since she was a little girl and he a slightly older boy. Soaking up all his knowledge of ancient Egypt, and enormously moved by the exotic beauty of an extraordinary and powerful landscape, slowly she registers that her feelings toward him are changing. To her chagrin, though, she can't help noticing that Jeremy seems very taken with Isobel Page, a wealthy young American they meet along the way.With delicately witty dialogue and amusing situations, Stella Tennyson Jesse takes us on an entertaining tour, not only of these tentatively perched emotions, but also of the magnificent and romantic remains of one of the world's great civilisations. Eve in Egypt is the sparklingly satisfying answer to a fascinating question: can one turn a travelogue into a beguiling novel? Jesse proves that one can, brilliantly.

Eve in Egypt

Jesse, Stella Tennyson

Humor & Satire

On first publication in 1958, The Daily Telegraph's reviewer said "Hugo Charteris' Europeans are neurotic, frightened, clinging to their fragmented patterns...the sheer intensity of the whole book is terrifying." In the wilds of British West Africa, in the 1950s, as colonialism is dying, a small group of whites administer and work a diamond mine, with African help. They are typical of their era in their casual racism, their preoccupation with British modes; the atmosphere can sometimes be likened to 'a Thames country club, circa 1938.' Around the mine are places where Africans from the surrounding area and neighbouring French territory also prospect for the valuable stones. This blasted landscape is the place from which the ferment of insurrection and dissatisfaction, which will bring about the colony's coming independence, arises. Porokorro, in particular, has been a troublespot lately. MacPherson, the local Provincial Commissioner, is nearing the end of his career. Wanting to spread a raft of calm upon these troubled waters, and wanting to show, from his intimate knowledge of the local people, that relations will never truly sour, he organizes what can only loosely be called a picnic - an outing to prove that all is well. With slowly coiling tension, Charteris loads the scene with many and varying points of view: Barber, the head of the mine, whose gregarious ease hides a calculated vision of exactly where the flashpoints might be hiding; Meyer, a diamond dealer, and survivor of Buchenwald, whose outward coolness hides a troubled marriage and a scarred psyche; Isobel, his much younger and seethingly restive wife, over on a visit; Warner, an idealistic journalist, who senses a story and is prepared to risk disaster in pursuing it; and Paul MacPherson, the Provincial Commissioner's young son out from school in Britain, who chases butterflies with his net, fascinated by the glimpse his father is giving him of a lifestyle which is slowly but surely ceasing to exist. The 'picnic' to Porokorro will change them all, and one of them won't come back alive. The spare, snakelike prose of Hugo Charteris' fourth novel explores the late colonial mindset with fascinating depth and unusual candour, creating a harshly vivid portrait of people trapped in the ending of an era.

Picnic at Porokorro

Charteris, Hugo

Noted Murder Mysteries (Belles-Lettres)

Biographies & Memoirs

Lowndes, Marie Belloc

True Crime

The Yellow Leaf: A Study From Life (Zephyr Books)

Grand, Sarah

In this extraordinary piece all of John Cowper Powys' eccentric and wild inventiveness is on display.
In a small flat in New York in the 1920s an old couple, former circus performers, live a crotchety life of poverty and fear. The ones they fear are 'the Authorities', their name for the cruel and unthinking denizens of the outside world who want to put them into a home.
But living with them in their tiny flat are many more presences than they suspect. Powys peoples their world with a gravely philosophical stuffed owl, an overly amorous china duck, a rude and fatalistic glass fish, a pair of tiny Asian god statues, a tenderly romantic doll, and a sadly dilapidated wooden horse, all of whom see the Known World (as they call the flat) in a biased way according to their super-individual visions.
Flitting through this busy roomscape are also less substantial beings: two wispy, half-created characters from the unfinished historical romance novel of a long-ago tenant, and, most importantly, the terribly thin and vaporous ghost of the kind old lady who had the flat before the old couple. Her extraordinary kindness could be the key to saving the old couple from the Authorities - can the ghost of Miss Rowe save the day?
With a saucy combination of ghoulishness and bouncing enthusiasm John Cowper Powys revels here in unbounded invention, creating a short masterpiece of great eccentricity and capacious fantasy.

The Owl, the Duck, and - Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe! (Zephyr)

POWYS,John Cowper

Having served as an older man in Flanders during the First World War, Hugh Lofting, famed author of the Doctor Dolittle series, was pacifist by leaning. He knew intimately the horror of human killing human in what seemed an endless litany of the worst of us. 
Then in 1942, in the midst of the unbelievable recurrence of war once again, and nearing the end of his life, the need to commit his feelings to paper became overwhelming. His passions and fears overflowed into a long poem, his only work for adults. 
Victory for the Slain begins with him encountering and helping a soldier who is struggling to light a cigarette, having lost a hand. He walks on, musing on the maiming cost of martial conflict. His path takes him to a church, where, alone, and surrounded by the sense of the past, the terrible present with its constant aerial bombing, and apprehension for the future at this uncertain and perilous stage of the war, he registers quaveringly and with great emotion both how fearful he is and how appallingly foolish are the paths down which humankind's belligerence can take us. 
Reflecting on history, philosophy, violence, nationalism, death, and what seems like madness, as he wanders through the quiet of the church he gravely sounds every vibration and implication of the horror which surrounds him in the world's current chaos. For him, there reverberates one heartrending refrain: in war, the only victors are the slain.

Victory for the Slain

LOFTING, HUGH

Poetry

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Books by Michael Walmer