Murmur
- 192 Seiten
- 7 Lesestunden
Murmur evokes the extraordinary life of Alan Turing, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness. Winner of the Wellcome Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize



Murmur evokes the extraordinary life of Alan Turing, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness. Winner of the Wellcome Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize
On a warm summer's evening in 1999, an earthquake strikes the heart of London. The epicentre of the tremor is a theatre, where a lavish production of The Tempest has just opened. In the cast are friends and enemies, among them a preening star, a drunken failure, and Martha, a young actress. In the audience sits her clever sister, Alice." "As the shockwaves subside, the veil between the real and the imaginary is lifted, and magical forces of envy, ambition, madness, and romance invade the world: Alice and Martha vie for love and precedence on stage; a mesmerist indulges his worthless son; and Leslie Barrington, a washed-up Caliban, dreams of literary revenge. Behind the scenes, a family tragedy awaits discovery. The players are, one by one, unmasked." "Nothing To Be Afraid Of is a lament for hope abandoned and innocence betrayed, but it is also an extravagant comic pageant of Shakespearean energy and compassion: an incidental theatrical history, across the twentieth century, of the art of pretence; of patience, trust, and loyalty; of folly in youth and old age."--BOOK JACKET
"In 1983, an ordinary teenager called Daniel Rathbone fell in love, spurned a friend, and stumbled on the ability to see in the dark." "Years later, on his twenty-fifth birthday, Daniel is bequeathed a second no less unusual gift - a Victorian writing box, or 'slope', the legacy of his father and the repository both of youthful ambition and of a dimly perceived guilt. The box is opened, but its contents resist interpretation." "When a visit from the once-spurned friend, Carey Schumacher, coincides with the death of a contemporary, Daniel's peculiar endowments are enlisted to make lasting sense of lost time and place." "From Bath to Brixton, from the 1960s to the 90s, The Oversight follows a trail of thwarted and victorious affections. It is an intently comic tale of vision and delusion; of family, friendship and desertion; and of the divisively cruel need to belong. A multi-layered debut of distinction."--BOOK JACKET