The second novel from the author of the critically acclaimed Newton’s Niece (1994).On an ocean liner travelling to Australia in 1959, a young boy witnesses a courtship between two of its passengers, a relationship that begins to unsettle the others aboard. Beneath them in the hold, beyond where the dogs and cats and mynah bird are kept, squats a far more sinister cargo – a nuclear arms shipment bound for the Outback testing grounds.A romantic love affair then, on a doomed boat in dangerous...
A major new novel from the critically acclaimed author of IF THE INVADER COMES.On Boxing Day 1962 it began to snow. Over the next two months England froze. It was the coldest winter since 1740. The sea iced over. Cars could be driven across the Thames.Riding home from London in that first snowfall, on the powerful motorbike he has been given for Christmas, seventeen-year-old Alan Rae has a brush with death. Immediately he meets a girl, Cynthia, who will change his life. But someone else is...
A critically acclaimed, Booker long-listed novel that is reminiscent of Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration Trilogy’.Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phylis, Clarice’s cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with...
A lavish and richly detailed portrait of the world of Newton and the London of that time.From the disturbing goings-on in a South London mental hospital, the narrator of this daring and ambitious novel hurtles back through the past, to the character of Kit, Isaac Newton’s niece. What unfolds is a story of conflicting male and female universes at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a time when Newton and others were claiming the meaning of the world for themselves and trying to fix it in...
