Lawrence Norfolk Boeken

The eighth volume in the British Council's "New Writing" series, which exists to promote the best in contemporary literature. This one features new writing from such people as Louis De Bernieres, Hanif Kureishi, Don Paterson, A.S. Byatt, William Boyd, Lana Citron, and Barry Unsworth.

In the remote village of Buckland, a mob chants of witchcraft. It is 1625, and John and his mother are running for their lives. Taking refuge among the trees of Buccla's Wood, John's mother opens her book and begins to tell her son of an ancient Feast kept in secret down the generations. Little does he know that one day, to keep hold of all that he holds most dear, he most realize his mother's vision - he must serve the Saturnall Feast.

As the seventeenth century opens, a band of venturers forms the Honourable Company of Merchants trading from England to the East Indies. In France, the siege of La Rochelle ends with the massacre of thirty thousand men, women and children. Almost two centuries later, in 1788, John Lemprière published his classical dictionary. This much is fact. Lawrence Norfolk tells us how the first two events led, inescapably, to the third.This amazing tale encompasses the Great Voyages of Discovery and multinational financial conspiracies, and leads a motley cast of scholars and eccentrics, drunk aristocrats and whores, assassins and octogenarian pirates through two centuries and three continents to the brink of French Revolution.John Lemprière reluctantly enters this world as an introverted scholar, obsessed by the myths of antiquity. At the end of this astonishing story he understands that it takes far more than learning to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

In pre-Homeric times, the Greek heroes united one last time to hunt down the Boar of Kalydon. Three and a half millennia later, the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon is re-enacted, and once again re-told. In the final months of WWII, Greek partisans pursue their quarry, an SS officer, in the same mountains the ancient Boar of Kalydon once roamed. Witness to the hunt is Sol Memel, a young Rumanian-Jewish poet fleeing for his life. Sol has lost his family and abandoned his lover, Ruth. Sol¿s role in the SS officer¿s eventual capture and killing inspires him to rewrite the ancient myth as a poem. When Ruth reappears twenty-five years later and proposes a film based on the writing of the poem, the ghosts of Sol¿s wartime past materialise. And behind them stand the ghosts of ancient Greece, the long-dead heroes who hold the truth behind the story of the original hunt.

A novel based on Portugal's attempt to bribe Pope Leo X with a living rhinoceros

Una storia di intrighi e vendette tra diciassettesimo e diciottesimo secolo, che appassiona come un romanzo poliziesco toccando l'Atlantico e il Mediterraneo e poi Londra, Versailles... per approdare all'Isola di Jersey, nella Manica. Al centro di questa gigantesca ragnatela c'è il giovane John Lemprière, bizzarro autore di un dizionario di mitologia classica e ignaro studioso che vanta una cultura pari solo alla sua miopia visiva. Poderosa l'una, preoccupante l'altra, entrambe avvolgono il personaggio in una curiosa nebbia densa di fumose possibilità, che diventano particolarmente terrorizzanti quando i miti di Ovidio e gli altri fantasmi del mondo classico sembrano prendere possesso dell'esistenza di John sotto forma di allucinazioni o quadri viventi: così come la morte di suo padre, sbranato dai cani, sembra replicare la tragica storia di Diana e Atteone... Occorre indagare, e dopo la lettura del testamento, in una Londra di atmosfera dickensiana, inizia una vera e propria caccia al tesoro a ritroso nel tempo, alla ricerca del filo segreto che lega la Compagnia delle Indie, il massacro di La Rochelle e il dizionario di Lemprière. Ne scaturisce una vicenda intricata, a metà tra la fantasia barocca, il resoconto storico e i grandi viaggi d'esplorazione, che si snoda tra società segrete, faide secolari e, soprattutto, attraverso un campionario di curiosa umanità, dove sfilano eruditi eccentrici, aristocratici ubriaconi, giudici paranoici, puttane, turpi assassini e vecchi pirati...