Author: nuwuser

Flora Trevelyan is a ten-year-old misfit, despised by her selfish and indolent parents, and left to wander the streets of a small French town whilst her parents prepare to depart for life in colonial India. There she befriends the locals, acquires an extensive vocabulary of French foul language and encounters the privileged lifestyle of the elegant, middle-class British families holidaying in 1920s France.

Introduced for the first time to kindly, civilised and, above all, caring people Flora falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with not one but three young men.

Over the next forty years Flora will grow from an awkward schoolgirl into a stunning beauty and explore, consummate and finally resolve each of these affairs.

( paraphrased from the sleeve by GoodReads,   380 pages )

Told as a series of interconnected stories, Jane Rule’s fifth novel—offering six characters’ shifting perspectives—takes us to a place where feminism, creativity, and sexual politics collide 
Contract with the World follows a group of friends, artists, and lovers as they negotiate the shifting terrain of the 1970s—a time when gay and lesbian politics were just emerging.   Divided into six parts, the novel enters a world marked by desire, ambition, jealousy, and love. We follow these sexually adventurous thirty-something friends as they marry, divorce, take lovers, lose love, and never stop searching for personal and artistic fulfillment. Whether gay, straight, or bisexual, Rule’s characters are as much a product of the era that defines them as of the wise and foolhardy choices they make in their own turbulent lives—choices that will have inevitable, sometimes tragic consequences.

( Courtesy of Google Books,   339 pages )

Eileen Hughes, twenty years old and never before out of Northern Ireland, has arrived in London for a week’s holiday with Bernard and Mona McAuley, who are not only her employers but also, she believes, her friends. In Brian Moore’s masterful handling, this seemingly simple story darkens and expands, exploring the nature of obsession―both spiritual and erotic―with an elegance, anarchic playfulness, and imagination that recall Henry Green or Muriel Spark.

( Courtesy of AbeBooks,   164 pages )

‘Miss Hawkins looked at her watch. It was two-thirty. If everything went according to schedule, she could safely reckon to be dead by six o’clock.’

But by the day’s end, events have taken a dramatic turn and Miss Hawkins is sentenced to live. Forcibly retired, she is presented by her colleagues with a five-year diary.

Programmed since childhood to total obedience, Miss Hawkins slavishly follows her dairy’s commands until the impossible happens – she meets a man. As a last reprieve from the horrors of loneliness she embarks on a determined full-scale mission to taste life’s secret pleasures – and pains– until the cup runs dry…

( from the sleeve,  186 pages )