Showing results by author "Hermione Lee" in All Categories

Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love - remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences.

With profound empathy and insight, Hermione Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.

Helen Edmunds, Representative Elder of the Court of the High Advisors, has devoted the last fourteen years of her life to King Patrick and Queen Marianne of the Otherworld while confining herself to the royal palace and enduring the hostility and hatred of her fellow Elders. Yet when she is assigned to mentor Evonne Fitzgerald, a young, youthful Elder-in-training, her life brightens up in every aspect. The two of them grow inseparable, soon becoming each other’s twin flame as they form a bond of sisterhood. However, a tragedy befalls Evonne one day, leaving Helen to deal with the ...

Life has never been smoother for Eric Williams, who grew up with his abusive mother, the queen of the sinister Underworld. The Otherworld, his new home, is a realm of peace, felicity, and harmony, everything he has wished for. However, when a series of misfortunes befall his dearest friends, he begins to realize the true colors of his malicious fellow Elders, and his perfect illusion of the utopian Otherworld unravels at the seams. When a surprise invasion from the Underworld ends in an unexpected way, Eric is forced to awaken from the childish dream that has enveloped him in a state of ...