Book picks similar to
Praxis by Fay Weldon


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literary-fiction
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The Doctor's Wife


Brian Moore - 1976
    Awaiting her husband's arrival on holiday in France, Sheila Redden,quiet, middle-aged doctor's wife, suddenly finds herself caught up in a passionate affair with a young American, ten years her junior, this extraordinary powerful portrayal of a woman transformed by love was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Grace Notes


Bernard MacLaverty - 1997
    With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna — estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and musician making her mark in a male-dominated field. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand.

An Ice-Cream War


William Boyd - 1982
    It follows the fortunes of several wildly different characters - including an expat farmer and a young English aristocrat - as they are swept up in the fighting in German East Africa during the First World War, their lives converging amid battle, betrayal, love, comedy and tragedy.

Hotel du Lac


Anita Brookner - 1984
    When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.

St. Urbain's Horseman


Mordecai Richler - 1971
    Urbain’s Horseman has now been adapted into a high-profile two-part CBC drama. The attention this star-studded and heavily promoted mini-series will receive will renew interest in the book among Richler fans and introduce many new readers to this modern classic, now available in this attractive tie-in edition.St. Urbain’s Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderfully comic evocation of a generation consumed with guilt – guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound. Thirty-seven-year-old Jake Hersh is a film director of modest success, a faithful husband, and a man in disgrace. His alter ego is his cousin Joey, a legend in their childhood neighbourhood in Montreal. Nazi-hunter, adventurer, and hero of the Spanish Civil War, Joey is the avenging horseman of Jake’s impotent dreams. When Jake becomes embroiled in a scandalous trial in London, England, he puts his own unadventurous life on trial as well, finding it desperately wanting as he steadfastly longs for the Horseman’s glorious return. Irreverent, deeply felt, as scathing in its critique of social mores as it is uproariously funny, St. Urbain’s Horseman confirms Mordecai Richler’s reputation as a pre-eminent observer of the hypocrisies and absurdities of modern life.

The Blackwater Lightship


Colm Tóibín - 1999
    Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora have come together to tend to Helen's brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan's two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself.

Quartet in Autumn


Barbara Pym - 1977
    Lovingly, poignantly, satirically and with much humor, Pym conducts us through their small lives and the facade they erect to defend themselves against the outside world. There is nevertheless an obstinate optimism in her characters, allowing them in their different ways to win through to a kind of hope. Barbara Pym’s sensitive wit and artistry are at their most sparkling in Quartet in Autumn.

Holiday


Stanley Middleton - 1974
    Edwin is seeking to understand the failure of his marriage to Meg, but it turns out that her parents are staying at the same resort - whether by accident or design - and are keen to patch up the relationship. As the past and his enigmatic wife loom larger, deeper truths emerge and the perspective shifts in unexpected ways. This is an extremely subtle story, a consummate portrait of English provincial life told with all Stanley Middleton's artistry and depth of feeling. It was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974. Review quotation: "At first glance, or even at second, Stanley Middleton's world is easily recognizable...The excellence of art, for Middleton, is an exact vision of real things as they are. And because he is himself so exact an observer, his world at third glance can seem strange and disturbing or newly and brilliantly lit with colour." (A.S. Byatt).

Scar Tissue


Michael Ignatieff - 1993
    More than a tale of isolated tragedy, Scar Tissue explores the bonds of memory, their configuartion in self-identity, and their relationship to love, loyalty, and death.

Last Letters from Hav


Jan Morris - 1985
    Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism and insanity. As Jan Morris guides us through the corridors and quarters of Hav, we hear the mingling of Italian, Russian, and Arabic in its markets, delight in its famous snow raspberries, and meet the denizens of its casinos and cafés. Reviews: "After reading Last Letters from Hav, what travel writer would ever want to report from an actual place? . . . a vigorous literary hybrid; elegant fiction in its own right but also a respectfully witty homage to indomitable English travel writers like Lawrence, Burton and Blanch." -Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times "A touching love-letter, not to an Invisible City but to life itself. Morris has penned a fable about an imaginary abroad to teach us about the here and now." -Peter J. Conradi, The Independent "Jan Morris has marshaled reportorial insight and literary flair to describe nearly every interesting place on the planet. Unique among them is Hav, which she revisits in her latest, perhaps most insightful book yet." -Donald Morrison, Time "Taken for the real thing on its first publication in 1985, this faux-travel memoir prompted fruitless calls to confused travel agents. It's no wonder: Morris's imagination is a marvel, her spectral country fully realized and fascinating. Hav, an eastern Mediterranean peninsula, rises believably in the mind, with its city skyline of onion domes, minarets, and one incongruous pagoda along with its glorious and complex history. Hav's past is ingeniously, believably intertwined with real events; its present is realistically faded and isolated, adding to the eerie feeling one gets of spying on a lost world." - Publishers Weekly

Rates of Exchange


Malcolm Bradbury - 1984
    But as soon as he sets out on a lecture tour behind the Iron Curtain and becomes embroiled in a confrontation with a matronly stewardess on the plane, it’s clear that he is off on a highly unusual adventure. Petworth makes his rounds of universities and after-hours vodka parties, weaving his way through a labyrinth of confusion, anxiety, and highly unlikely romance.

Amsterdam


Ian McEwan - 1998
    Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister.In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. A sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel, Amsterdam is "as sheerly enjoyable a book as one is likely to pick up this year" (The Washington Post Book World).

Figures in a Landscape


Barry England - 1968
    Their most important resource being their instinct to survive. Safety is 400 miles away, across savage country but all the time they are pursued by a helicopter which hovers overhead. From the author of NO MAN'S LAND.

Arthur & George


Julian Barnes - 2005
    Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife–their fates become inextricably connected.In Arthur & George, Julian Barnes explores the grand tapestry of late-Victorian Britain to create his most intriguing and engrossing novel yet.

Utz


Bruce Chatwin - 1988
    His collection, which he has protected and enlarged through both World War II and Czechoslovakia's years of Stalinism, numbers more than 1,000 pieces, all crammed into his two-room Prague flat. Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and although he has considered defection, he always returns. He cannot take his precious collection with him, but he cannot leave it, either. And so Utz is as much owned by his porcelain as it is owned by him, as much of a prisoner of the collection as of the Communist state.A fascinating, enigmatic man, Kaspar Utz is one of Bruce Chatwin's finest creations. And his story, as delicately cast as one of Utz's porcelain figures, is unforgettable.