I am Mary Dunne

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Anita Brookner

I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory.' Elizabeth and Betsy are old school friends. Born in 1948 and unready for the sixties, they had high hopes of the lives they would lead, even though their circumstances were so different. When they meet again in their thirties, Elizabeth, married to the safe, older Digby is relieving the boredom of a cosy but childless marriage with an affair. Betsy seems to have found real romance in Paris. Are their lives taking off, or are they just making more of the wrong choices without even realising it?

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Hortense Calisher

One afternoon in the early seventies Carol is sent out for Chinese food, and, while she is away, the explosive device which her revolutionary student friends are busy constructing, accidentally goes off, causing enormous damage. Her friends get away - she is incarcerated. Twenty years later, she has a small, unfurnished flat in New York, a fridge stocked only with the pills supplied by her social worker and an irresistible urge to slip away and live somewhere unencumbered by memories, names and all of her other false possessions. When she finally discovers that even her social worker is taking pills in an attempt to cope with life, Carol gathers a few essential belongings into her backpack and sets off to sleep rough on the city's streets again. Turning away from her dependence on drugs, Carol finds that memories, histories and responsibilities slowly return to her. In the Slammer with Carol Smith is a tough, hip novel by one of America's most outstanding living authors. It has the steady rhythms of the street as well as the haltings and hesitations experienced by the strong yet vulnerable Carol as she rediscovers herself. In fits and starts, the wild terrain of a life spent wandering under distant, unknown stars is mapped out. Carol's journey is both a rediscovery of emotional hiding-places and a search for the path that leads back into a world of normality without illusions and of sanity devoid of compromise.

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Anita Brookner

Modest, reliable, decorous George Bland faces retirement, surprised to find himself suddenly alone and uncertain. His solitude is brusquely overturned when the mercurial and invasive Katy Gibb appears. By turn sulky girl and sultry woman, Katy embodies an attitude of entitlement quite foreign to Bland, yet she also appears to offer a last chance for adventure, for abandoning the weight of a lifetime of discretion and responsibility. In the contest of wills that follows, Bland discovers his true nature, his capacity for compromise and self-deception. The result is a novel rich in understanding of human complexity and of the desire to take charge of one's own destiny.

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Valérie Chevalier

Bien malgré elle, Florence est une amoureuse en série. Romantique et fleur bleue, elle croyait dur comme fer que son premier amour durerait toujours. Mais la vie s'est vite chargée de lui prouver que la réalité n'est pas comme dans les films, et que son destin serait différent de celui des membres de sa famille, dont les couples perdurent, pour le meilleur et pour le pire. Au fil de ses rencontres, Florence échafaude une théorie sur l'amour. Même si elle continue d'y croire, elle se bute au mur des ruptures, et se laisse doucement aller au cynisme et à la désillusion. Mais le soleil n'est jamais très loin, et lorsqu'on lâche prise, le courant finit bien par nous mener quelque part. Une série de sketchs tragi-comiques pour rêver à l'amour ou se remettre de ses peines. Ne vous en faites pas, ceci est un livre, et les histoires, ça finit souvent bien.