Dream on
Dai Smith
"'Dream on' is a black comedy, a flashlight noir thriller, a meditation on the lives and stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living" - dust jacket.
Read Time: ~5.7 hr
A perfect execution
by Tim Binding (1996)
About this book
In the Vale of Aylesbury, near Oxford, during World War II, a young man named Jeremiah Bembo is shaken to his core by the sight of a downed German pilot - mortally wounded, taunted by villagers, hanging from a tree. This horrible vision of death effects a profound change in him, and presents a kind of calling: to become a benevolent executioner, a figure of succor and compassion in men's final hours. In time he is England's swiftest, most expert hangman, a revered and dreaded legend known as Solomon Straw. A Perfect Execution is the story of Jeremiah, of Solomon, of a man so moved by death that he becomes a merciful angel. It is also the story of the world that turns around him: of his wife, Judith, whose passions wash like tides over her husband's stony stillness; of his brash cousin, Will, who vies for Judith's heart; and of three restless young people whose longings intersect in a small-town tragedy that encompasses Jeremiah, Judith, Will - and Solomon Straw.
Setting / LocationLondon & UK
Story EraWWII Era
Protagonist / CoreA perfect execution Lead Character
Readers who enjoyed this also loved
The Armada boy
Kate Ellis
When archaeologist Neil Watson discovers the recently deceased body of an American veteran of the D Day landings, he calls on help from his old friend DS Wesley Peterson. As the two men set out to solve the mystery, they come across various characters who might have motives for murder.
The Prestige
Christopher Priest
Two 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later. Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, they prowl edgily in the background of each other's shadowy life, driven to the extremes by a deadly combination of obsessive secrecy and insatiable curiosity. At the heart of the row is an amazing illusion they both perform during their stage acts. The secret of the magic is simple, and the reader is in on it almost from the start, but to the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both have something more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.
The song of names
Norman Lebrecht
The close friendship between Martin Simmonds and violin prodigy Dovidl Rappoport, two Jewish boys living in London between the 1930s and the end of World War II, is threatened by the unexpected disappearance of Dovidl on the eve of his debut performance.