Search results for ""Author Joanna Kavenna""

'Fun and erudite' Sunday Times'Snort-inducingly funny' Daily Mail'One of the cleverest books you'll read this year' TelegraphEvery system, however immaculate, has a few little glitches.The latest in domestic tech should have predicted that businessman George Mann was about to murder his family. But instead it crashes and leads to the wrong man being caught and punished.Are there gremlins in digital giant Beetle's ubiquitous wearable tech, talking fridges and Dickensian droids? Have they been hacked, or is something even more sinister going on?With the clock ticking philandering Beetle CEO Guy Matthias, conflicted national security agent Eloise Jayne, depressed journalist David Strachey, and secretive hacker Gogol each try to uncover the truth in a darkly funny and horribly recognisable world only days ahead of our own.'Witty and horrifyingly relevant . . . Full of dark humour and refreshingly frank social commentary with a distinctly Orwellian flavour.' Scotsman

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Rosa Lane is a fashionable journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job - and begins her long fall from modern grace.

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Cassandra White is a woman on a mission. Her Lakeland farm may be falling apart, but at least she's escaped the madness of modern life. But when her valley is invaded by bankers buying up second homes, she's determined to put up a fight. What begins as a hare-brained scheme with a few unruly locals soon has the whole community taking up arms - and, before she knows it, Cassandra's leading a revolution...

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Vienna1865: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis has been hounded into a lunatic asylum, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. The deaths of thousands of mothers are on his conscience and his dreams are filled with blood. 2153: humans are birthed and raised in breeding centres, nurtured by strangers and deprived of familial love. Miraculously, a woman conceives, and Prisoner 730004 stands trial for concealing it.London in 2009: Michael Stone's novel about Semmelweis has been published, after years of rejection. But while Michael absorbs his disconcerting success, his estranged mother is dying and asks to see him again. As Michael vacillates, Brigid Hayes, exhausted and uncertain whether she can endure the trials ahead, begins the labour of her second child.A beautifully constructed and immensely powerful work about motherhood that is also a story of rebellion, isolation and the damage done by rigid ideologies.

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Woolf's fine character studies of several authors, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who 'seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering and hanging suspended'. He is, Woolf adds,so complex, so eccentric, that we 'become dazed in the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge'. He was incapable of adopting requisite social modes, of suppressing his obsessive urge to talk, of pandering to the expectations of others. Woolf tries to capture a 'clear picture' of Coleridge but this metaphor is skewed and what she really reveals is a voice - mad and beautiful - never to be heard again:

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'Smart, strange, coping with death through Light' Margaret Atwood'Extraordinary, wise, funny, adventurous' A. L. Kennedy'So utterly startling and inventive, it's almost an act of resistance' Miriam Toews'I couldn't put it down. A cult following seems certain' Literary Review'Refreshing as well as disconcerting to read a novel that sets aside convention so resolutely' Guardian'Opts to push the boundaries of what the novel is' Telegraph'A comic metaphysical thriller' Scotland on Sunday In this darkly ironic novel - a quest for truth, a satire, an elegy - Joanna Kavenna displays fearless originality and wit in confronting the strangeness of reality and how we contend with the death of those we love. Beautiful, ethereal drawings by Oly Ralfe illustrate this haunting journey through time, space and human understanding.

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In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche conducts his protagonist through his great journey of life - the quest for meaning, and fulfilment, and for a way to live with the knowledge of death. In this faithful new translation by Michael Hulse, Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendour, as a man who strives to find a way to live - joyfully - in a secular world. Luminous and ecstatic, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a grand celebration of perilous, beautiful, human life by one of the most important philosophers in history.

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Reality versus fiction is at the heart of the current literary debate. We live in a world of docu-drama, the 'real life' story. Works of art, novels, films, are frequently bolstered by reference to the autobiography of the creator, or to underlying 'fact.' Where does that leave the imagination? And who gets to define the parameters of 'reality' and 'fiction' anyway? Five writers debate the limits of materialism and realism, in art and literature - and offer a passionate defence of the alchemical imagination in a fact-based world.

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Rousham in Oxfordshire was one of the first landscape gardens created in England and is, still, one of the most influential. Designed by William Kent in the late 1730s for the Cottrell-Dormer family (who are its owners today) it has become a place of pilgrimage for landscape architects and garden designers worldwide as well as garden lovers. Its magical glades and sculptural set-pieces have long intrigued Francis Hamel, who has lived and worked there for 25 years. Since the beginning of 2020 he has composed an extraordinary collection of paintings that capture the gardens and their magic. With essays by Tom Stuart-Smith, Joanna Kavenna and Christopher Woodward, the reader is led down its mysterious pathways; from tree-shaded walks peopled with statues of Pan, Venus and other immortals to sun-dappled meadows carpeted with wild flowers. It is just as Kent left it– a secret garden that is open to all.

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