|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Description
内容説明
THE FACTS OF LIFE tells the story of an extraordinary family of seven sisters living in Coventry during the second world war. Presided over by an indomitable matriach the sisters live out a tangled and fraught life that takes them through the blitz, war work and on into the hopeful postwar years and a bizarre interlude for one of them in a commune. And through it all wanders the young son of one of the sisters, passed from sister to sister, the innocent witness to a life that edges over into the magical and the world of the fey.
From Publishers Weekly
Warm with nostalgia and flecked with the subtle fantasy that seasons nearly all his fiction, Joyce's latest novel (after Smoking Poppy) is an uneven mix of the charming and the self-consciously peculiar. The setting is Coventry, England, in the years after WWII, where the surviving Vine family-mother Martha, her seven grown daughters and their various offspring-are all trying to build lives out of the ruins left by Nazi bombs. The bittersweet events center on young Frank, the illegitimate son of psychologically unstable youngest daughter Cassie, who like his mum has inherited a fey streak that makes him receptive to precognition and restless spirits. As Frank and Cassie bounce from household to household, cared for by different family members, their peregrinations evoke in miniature the British postwar experience, mirrored in the lives of Cassie's siblings: one is married to a man who relives the war through his affair with a dead soldier's wife; another is a politically liberal participant in a comically self-destructing socialist commune. Virtually plotless, the book unfolds as a series of vignettes, interrelated loosely through shared, affectionately realized characters and seriocomic treatments of death and (especially) sexuality. Frank's supernatural experiences, which include frequent sessions with a mysterious figure he refers to cryptically as "The-Man-Behind-The-Glass," are hints that he shares hi relatives' powers. Indeed, the subtlety with which Joyce presents clairvoyant episodes makes them entirely credible in a novel that celebrates the strong bond of family and the deep well of sensitivity on which they all draw. In the end, this is a haunting story about flawed but good-hearted people who bear the hallmarks of eccentricity but also the beneficent aura of human connectedness.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
First Sentence
If she's not here, thinks Cassie, if she's not coming. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
If she's not here, thinks Cassie, if she's not coming. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- Author Comments
- Publisher's comments
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
