Книги, похожие на «Matthew Fort, Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa»

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday…‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

Following the great success of Jane Asher’s debut novel The Longing, her second psychological thriller is a compassionate, compelling and beautifully written study of the terrible effect of jealousy on a woman’s life.John and Eleanor Hamilton are middle-aged, wealthy, and settled in their comfortable life in Hampshire and London. John didn’t want children, so instead Eleanor used her energies to help run the company and get involved in the local community. So imagine her horror when, one day, she discovers that her husband has led a secret life for twenty years, in the shape of a mistress and a nineteen-year-old daughter – the daughter that she herself never had.The jealousy that Eleanor feels is all-consuming, driving her to limits she would never have thought possible. Then John, badly injured in a car crash, becomes a victim of PVS – Persistent Vegetative State. Although he is capable of communicating by the tiniest of signals, he has no quality of life.And so arises the ultimate question – and the ultimate opportunity for revenge. Should he live, or should he die? John’s fate hangs in the balance as the three women he deceived and betrayed decide upon the answer.