Search results for ""author j.g. farrell""

NOW A MAJOR ITV DRAMA, THE SINGAPORE GRIP IS A MODERN CLASSIC FROM THE BOOKER-PRIZE WINNING J.G. FARRELL'Brilliant, richly absurd, melancholy' Observer'Enjoyable on many different levels' Sunday Times'One of the most outstanding novelists of his generation' SpectatorSingapore, 1939: Walter Blackett, ruthless rubber merchant, is head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. And his family's prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. No one suspects it - but this world is poised on the edge of the abyss. This is the eve of the Fall of Singapore.A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip is a modern classic.'A narrative of exceptional imagination and scope' Newsweek'A fine piece of work, informative, funny tragic. One of those novels that present a whole world for the reader to inhabit' Margaret Drabble'No writer has swallowed all of Singapore with the verve and wit of the late J.G. Farrell' Time'His brilliant of style places him beside such masters of the modern novel as Patrick White and Saul Bellow' Olivia Manning

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WINNER OF THE 1970 BOOKER PRIZE'And so at the Majestic everything returned to the way it had been before. The gleaming tiles became dulled. Sofas as sleek as prize cattle lost their glow.' 1919, the Majestic Hotel in Kinalough, Ireland. Haunted war veteran Major Brendan Archer arrives to marry Angela Spencer, daughter of the house. But his fiancée is strangely altered, and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating; its few remaining guests thrive on rumours and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. And outside the order of the British Empire totters, as the violence of 'the troubles' mounts. 'A work of genius' Guardian

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NOW A MAJOR ITV DRAMA, THE SINGAPORE GRIP IS A MODERN CLASSIC FROM THE BOOKER-PRIZE WINNING J.G. FARRELL'Brilliant, richly absurd, melancholy' Observer'Enjoyable on many different levels' Sunday Times'One of the most outstanding novelists of his generation' SpectatorSingapore, 1939: Walter Blackett, ruthless rubber merchant, is head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. And his family's prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. No one suspects it - but this world is poised on the edge of the abyss. This is the eve of the Fall of Singapore.A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip is a modern classic.'A narrative of exceptional imagination and scope' Newsweek'A fine piece of work, informative, funny tragic. One of those novels that present a whole world for the reader to inhabit' Margaret Drabble'No writer has swallowed all of Singapore with the verve and wit of the late J.G. Farrell' Time'His brilliant of style places him beside such masters of the modern novel as Patrick White and Saul Bellow' Olivia Manning

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WINNER OF THE 1973 BOOKER PRIZE'We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?' Krishnapur, 1857: India is on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny. In this remote town on the vast North Indian plain, life for the British is still orderly and genteel. But when the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt, the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short when the British find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion - at once brutal, blundering and wistful - is soon revealed. 'An idiosyncratic masterpiece, wise and richly comic' Hilary Mantel

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'From the wide veranda you stepped out on to an acre of lawn, as smooth as glass; from the lawn you stepped on to nothing but fresh air.' A summer of the 1870s, the Himalayan resort of Simla, in colonial India. To the cool of the hills comes a reluctant Dr McNab, with his wife and young niece. For Emily, romance is in the air. For the mysterious Mrs Forester, there is scandal brewing. And for the Bishop of Simla, rain clouds are not the only storms on the horizon. The Hill Station is the novel on which J. G. Farrell was working at the time of his tragically early death. It demonstrates powerfully what a great loss to literature this was. 'Remarkable, captivating from page one' Evening Standard

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The novelist J.G. Farrell - known to his friends as Jim - was drowned on August 11, 1979 when he was swept off rocks by a sudden storm while fishing in the West of Ireland. He was in his early forties. Had he not sadly died so young,A" remarked Salman Rushdie in 2008, there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary.A" The Siege of Krishnapur, the second of Farrell's Empire Trilogy, won the Booker Prize in 1973, and it was selected as one of only six previous winners to compete in the 2008 international 'Best of Booker' competition. The strength of American interest in Farrell's books is underlined by the inclusion of all three Trilogy novels in the Classics imprint of the New York Review of Books. Troubles won the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. Many of these selected letters are written to women whom Jim Farrell loved and whom he inadvertently hurt. His ambition to be a great writer in an age of minimal author's earnings ruled out the expense of marriage and fatherhood, so self-sufficiency was his answer. Books Ireland has astutely portrayed him as 'a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a man who wanted solitude and yet did not want it, wanted love but feared commitment, reached out again and again but, possibly through fear of rejection, was always the first to cut the cord.' But Farrell's kindness, deft humour and gift for friendship reached across rejection, which must account for why so many such letters were kept. Funny, teasing, anxious and ambitious, these previously unpublished letters to a wide range of friends give the reader a glimpse of this private man. Ranging from childhood to the day before his death, Farrell's distinctive letters have the impact of autobiography.

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