Лучшие книги Элисон Маклауд

Среди холмов Сассекса и на берегах Средиземного моря Д. Г. Лоуренс (для одних — современный классик, для других — записной нарушитель спокойствия и апологет непристойности) набирается впечатлений для своего последнего романа под рабочим названием «Нежность», который станет скандально знаменит как «Любовник леди Чаттерли». В 1928 году официальная публикация этой книги невозможна — и смертельно больной Лоуренс, отчаявшись, частным порядком печатает ее в Италии, тиражом 1000 экземпляров. Через тридцать лет общественный климат меняется, начинают дуть новые ветры — и вот сперва «Гроув-пресс» в США, а затем «Пингвин букс» в Англии решаются…

From 1920s Nova Scotia to the London riots of 2011, from Oscar Wilde’s grave to the Brighton Pavilion, these exquisitely formed stories capture the small tragedies and profound truths of existence.
Evocative, sensual, and tender, these stories confront reality culture and interrogate our relationship with iconic figures, coming to life at the boundary between reality and fiction.
A professor of cardiovascular physiology lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he waits for his new heart to be delivered, still beating, from another body—and is carried on a tidal wave of memories to an attic room half a century ago. Visiting Sylvia Plath’s grave in Yorkshire, the author imagines a conversation with the poet, a fellow North American who settled in grey England. She reflects on the treasured photograph of Princess Diana she took as a teenager, one of a multitude taken during a life cut short. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overpowered by echoes of the past—all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes. MacLeod’s characters hover on the border of life and death, where memory is most vivid and the present most elusive.

May, 1940. On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton. It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ. As the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, and her thoughts become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation. Then she meets Otto…

EVERY STORY IS THE STORY OF A SECRET This is a story that unfolds across two far-flung centuries, across two worlds. In each, the lives of a father and his two daughters are about to be catapulted into crisis.

France. 1284. In the heat of an August night, Christina-sister of Marguerite, daughter of the heretic sculptor Giles of Beauvais-struggles to keep a secret. The year is also 2001. We're in Chicago, where Christina Carver, daughter of rebel physicist Dr Giles Carver, also keeps a secret, even from her sister Maggie. When a bell rings for matins-when a telephone rings in the middle of the night-Christina will fail to wake and all six lives will change forever.

The Wave Theory of Angels is a story of attractions, both cosmic and earthly. The riddles of magic, metaphysics and modern-day science transport the reader from the enchantment of the thirteenth century to the disenchantment of the twenty-first and back again. Through it all, one question persists: What is the real force of the imagination?