Unexploded
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Unexploded is Alison MacLeod's compelling novel of love and prejudice in wartime Brighton.
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013.
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.
Praise for Alison MacLeod:
'Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling' Helen Dunmore
'MacLeod's fictions are evocations of desire and its mysteries . . . [Her] characters are strong, and they are worth listening to' Guardian
'MacLeod has an engaged delight in the stuff of life' The Times Literary Supplement
'MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty' Metro
Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intimate period drama, MacLeod subjects the uncertain moorings of family to an ill-defined wartime peril. In 1940's Brighton, a German invasion is expected any day; "Fear was an infection airborne, seaborne rolling in off the Channel...." Geoffrey Beaumont has been named Superintendent of an enemy alien camp, son Philip imagines life under Hitler's rule, and his wife Evelyn struggles to adapt as the world she knows succumbs to fear. Into this fragility MacLeod introduces Otto, a German-Jewish painter who makes Evelyn's acquaintance as she visits prisoners to read to them. There are fine flourishes of style and empathy within this Man Booker long-listed novel; the author beautifully captures the weariness of paranoia, the way the fear eventually yields "to the pleasure of May blossom and the horse chestnuts fear was forgotten over a book or a weak cup of tea." MacLeod is an astonishing crafter of nuance, writing of the manner in which people "are broken by everything cannot say," perfectly capturing the paradox of people consumed by petty anti-Semitic tendencies yet worried of Hitler's coming. The plot does suffer a slight predictability, the Beaumonts weathering various betrayals and infidelities as time crawls by and the invasion fails to occur. Yet this is ultimately a fine work, laden with moments of subtle grace.