REVIEW – The Bell Bookshop

Fathers & Sons

Emma — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The Waugh family has been writing books since the nineteenth century. Evelyn’s father, brother and son were all writers and now his grandson has taken up the baton. Based on recollections of his father, Auberon, and on a mine of hitherto unseen documents relating to Evelyn and his close family, Alexander Waugh skilfully traces the threads of influence that have linked father to son across a century of conflict, turmoil and change.

FATHERS AND SONS is much more than a family tale: it is a study of birth and death, of writers and writing, of conforming and rebelling. It is a frank and intimate memoir, a revealing history and a book about famous men.

After Youd Gone

Emma — Thu, 05 Apr 2001 00:00:00 +0000

AFTER YOU’D GONE is the groundbreaking debut novel from the Costa-Award winning Maggie O’Farrell, author of HAMNET and I AM, I AM, I AM. It is a stunning, best-selling novel of wrenching love and grief.

A distraught young woman boards a train at King’s Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London.

AFTER YOU’D GONE follows Alice’s mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at a family’s heart.

Earth & Heaven

Emma — Thu, 04 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000

In the aftermath of the First World War, the painter Walter Cox cherishes the place of his childhood to keep the pulse of his art alive. Haunted by his work, his young daughter Meredith has her own fight: to quell the power of her inner life.

Deeply affecting, shot through with a shimmering apprehension of the natural world, EARTH AND HEAVEN is about life’s fragility, and the power of love and painting to disturb, renew and reveal us to ourselves.