The Book Boy by Joanna Trollope narrated by Kate Lock
Alice is thirty-eight and has a house, a husband, two teenage children and a part-time job. She thinks she ought to be happy but she isn't. Instead, she feels she has vanished, that she is like something lost down the back of the sofa. Because Alice has a secret that is never spoken of in the family. She can't read.
Now timid, quiet Alice must start out on her own brave journey, and for it she chooses the strangest companion. For the first time in her life, she knows what she wants and she is going to get it. With the help of the book boy.
Literature and the Irish Famine 1845-1919 (Oxford Historical Monographs)
The impact of the Irish famine of 1845-1852 was unparalleled in both political and psychological terms. The effects of famine-related mortality and emigration were devastating, in the field of literature no less than in other areas. In this incisive new study, Melissa Fegan explores the famine's legacy to literature, tracing it in the work of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919. Dr Fegan examines both fiction and non-fiction, including journalism, travel-narratives and the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope. "A valuable and sophisticated negotiation between the disciplines of history and literature."--Times Literary Supplement
Added by: ninasimeo | Karma: 4370.39 | Fiction literature | 29 April 2010
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The Way We Live Now is the essence of Trollope. If he had written no other novel, it would have ensured his immortality. He paints a picture as panoramic as his title promises, of the life of 1870s London, the loves of those drawn to and through the city, and the career of Augustus Melmotte, who is one of the Victorian novel's greatest and strangest creations, and is an achievement undimmed by the passage of time. Trollope's 'Now' might, in the 21st century, look like some distant disenchanted 'Then', but this is still the yesterday which we must understand in order to make proper sense of our today.
