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A luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize.
A luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.
The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's
death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a
child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But
it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled
vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love
and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the
twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose
mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of
the "barely bearable raw immediacy" of his childhood memories.
Interwoven with this story are Morden's memories of his wife, Anna—of their
life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that
make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire,
desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house
where he is staying, where the past beats inside him "like a second heart."
What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects
on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written
novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.
Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize.
I
They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a
milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of
heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no
wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk
of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than
any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I
would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved,
it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister,
lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those
birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the
waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever
again.
Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.
The name of the house is the Cedars, as of old....
Booker Prize
2005
The Booker Prize was
established by the Booker
McConnell company in 1969, and
is considered to be one of
most important literary awards
in the UK, if not the most
important. In recent years it
has been sponsored by the Man
Group, an investment company,
and thus is officially known as
The Man Booker Prize, but is
more often referred to simply as
'The Booker'.
Pierre Bonnard: Max has a
tendency to muse over the
paintings of Pierre Bonnard and
in particular Bonnard's
paintings ...
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Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you
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