Лучшие книги Элисон Маклауд

Среди холмов Сассекса и на берегах Средиземного моря Д. Г. Лоуренс (для одних — современный классик, для других — записной нарушитель спокойствия и апологет непристойности) набирается впечатлений для своего последнего романа под рабочим названием «Нежность», который станет скандально знаменит как «Любовник леди Чаттерли». В 1928 году официальная публикация этой книги невозможна — и смертельно больной Лоуренс, отчаявшись, частным порядком печатает ее в Италии, тиражом 1000 экземпляров. Через тридцать лет общественный климат меняется, начинают дуть новые ветры — и вот сперва «Гроув-пресс» в США, а затем «Пингвин букс» в Англии решаются…

From 1920s Nova Scotia to the London riots of 2011, from Oscar Wilde’s grave to the Brighton Pavilion, these exquisitely formed stories capture the small tragedies and profound truths of existence.
Evocative, sensual, and tender, these stories confront reality culture and interrogate our relationship with iconic figures, coming to life at the boundary between reality and fiction.
A professor of cardiovascular physiology lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he waits for his new heart to be delivered, still beating, from another body—and is carried on a tidal wave of memories to an attic room half a century ago. Visiting Sylvia Plath’s grave in Yorkshire, the author imagines a conversation with the poet, a fellow North American who settled in grey England. She reflects on the treasured photograph of Princess Diana she took as a teenager, one of a multitude taken during a life cut short. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overpowered by echoes of the past—all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes. MacLeod’s characters hover on the border of life and death, where memory is most vivid and the present most elusive.

May, 1940. On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton.

It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ. As the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, and her thoughts become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.

Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband's internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn's and Otto's mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest. Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.