Search results for ""Author Chris Dolan""
Saraband Everything Passes, Everything Remains: Freewheelin' Through Spain, Song and Memory
How would any of us feel if we could meet our teenage selves, a ghost on the road? Everything Passes, Everything Remains is a confluence of journeys, made by Chris Dolan, his friends, and writers before him. It’s a bit about cycling, a bit about walking, and a bit about buses. It’s a kind of travelogue, over time, and through some lesser-known parts of Spain. It’s an obsession with Spain’s writers and its history, from the Inquisition to the Civil War to the questions it faces as a country today. What makes a nation, or a family for that matter, or a group of friends? In many ways it’s as much about Dolan’s native Scotland as Spain. But mostly, it’s about the highs and lows of growing up and growing older – how the past plays merry hell with the present. About friendship, loss, music, memory, and the demons that follow us as we try to make sense of our history and our place in the world.
£10.48
Vagabond Voices Redlegs
Elspeth, a young Scottish actress, is selected by the elusive impresario Lord Coak for an acting career on the Caribbean Island of Barbados. She is briefly feted by the island community, but a tempest kills her lover and destroys the theatre in which she is to star. She is obliged to take on a supposedly temporary and ambiguous role at Lord Coak's plantation home. The closed environment of the estate is stifling, but it institutionalises her and gives her a degree of status. Dolan's plot takes some unexpected twists, but Elspeth is never free from the constrictions of working for an enterprise whose founding principle is racism. An oppressive sense of eventlessness pervades. Lord Coak's grand plan to modernise the estate cannot be implemented without social reform, but the resulting suspension of lives could also be seen as the human condition: our dreams can never be realised. Another catastrophic event breaks the spell and divides the community, many of whom leave in search of a more enlightened society and in so doing become a mythical people. However Elspeth and the reader remain locked into Lord Coak's estate, which starts rapidly to decay.
£11.21