Rosetta Palazzi Boeken

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marriage, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence ‘Tubby’ Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst. As Tubby’s life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks – via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood – on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment, in an ingenious, hilarious and poignant novel of neuroses.

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and their peers were bound to lose their spiritual innocence and their virginities on the way from the 1950s to the '70s. On the one hand there was the traditional Catholic Church, on the other the siren call of the permissive society. It was inevitable that things would change radically. But how far could it go?

When philandering cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger meets recently bereaved novelist Helen Reed sparks fly on the campus at the University of Gloucester. Ralph knows he wants Helen; Helen finds him attractive but rejects his advances on principle. Each thinks the other is wrong – about this, and much else. In chronicling their passionate and argumentative relationship, David Lodge has written a dazzling comic exploration of love and deception, the enigmas of consciousness and the intricacies of the human heart.