(Daedalus and Icarus, as well as King Minos play a part in the story, too.) At the same time, the novel explores very modern predicaments of the idealist who unwittingly destroys his family. The mythical Greek intervention in Colchis is subtly told by Chiladze as an allegory of Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s subversion and conquest of Georgia.

    

    Includes the following short story collections:- May We Borrow Your Husband?- A Sense of Reality- Twenty-One Stories

    Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax, and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

    It is the story of a cross-racial romance between a Samoan student at Auckland University, the son of migrant parents, and the daughter of a wealthy palagi family. It was an instant bestseller and was later made into a successful movie.

    While all but one or two of the longer tales seem to the modern reader formless and quite unworthy of comparison with the Iliad and the Odyssey, many of the briefer prose narratives pack a whole gamut of emotions into two or three thousand words.

      Inspired by historical events, The Siege of Krishnapur is the mesmerizing tale of a British outpost, under siege during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, whose residents find their smug assumptions of moral and military superiority and their rigid class barriers under fire—literally and figuratively. The hero of Troubles, having survived the battles of World War I, makes his way to Ireland in 1919, in search of his once-wealthy fiancée. What he finds is her family's enormous seaside hotel in a spectacular state of decline, overgrown and overrun by herds of cats and pigs and the few remaining guests. From this strange perch, moving from room to room as the hotel falls down around him, he witnesses the distant tottering of the Empire in the East and the rise of the violent "Troubles" in Ireland.