Книги, похожие на «Amelia Casey, Taken By The Highwayman»

A moving novel about the relationships within families and between friends, told through the touching story of a young woman starting out on a new life in London, on a quest to escape the claustrophobia of her small hometown.Nora Doyle, a young Irish girl, has come to university in London. The promise of a loving and idyllic childhood was brutally cut short when she was forced to assume the responsibility of looking after her Downs syndrome brother while her parents, devastated by his birth, retreated into their collapsed lives. Only Nora gave her brother the love, care and attention he needed, but she had to endure the watchful eye of her bullying, dogmatic father and the resentment of her crushed, self-pitying mother.To escape the small-town claustrophobia of a Northern Ireland battered by political and religious divisions, Nora begins a new life in London. But instead of finding friends and caring adults to make up for her own lack of parental love and normal family life, she unwittingly becomes the obsession of her narcissistic lecturer and finds it hard to connect with her peers. Too late she realises that she can escape from her family, but her behaviour and relationships with those around her continue to be shaped by her upbringing.Written with sensitivity and a rare emotional insight, this is a richly woven story about how we make connections and what it is that severs them.

Already a huge hit in France, the new novel from Independent Foreign Fiction Award-winning author of ‘Windows on the World’.In his most autobiographical text to date, Beigbeder recounts his stay in a French police cell in January 2008, after he was arrested for snorting cocaine off a car bonnet outside a nightclub in the super-chic 8th arrondissement of Paris. As he lies in the cell, he revisits his childhood, from the carefree days when his grandfather taught him to skim pebbles at the beach in Cénitz, to his parents’ divorce, the conflicting influences of his hedonistic father and studious, seemingly conventional brother who ‘has it all’, and his own first, unrequited loves. This patchwork of memories is as much a portrait of the era as it is the story of a fragile, self-critical man who has finally dropped the mask.Sharp, witty – with a particularly pitiless irony directed at himself – and yet tender, ‘A French Novel’ is a gem. Beigbeder’s reminiscences, his search for answers in the lost country of his childhood, will speak to a whole generation searching for its soul.