Contre-Jour: A Triptych after Pierre Bonnard

Obsession and rejection are the main themes of this novel about a woman who feels rejected by her parents, particularly by her mother. Her father, a painter, ignores the emotional turmoil all around him and continues to work, while his wife shows signs of mental breakdown. This novel was shortlisted for the 1986 Whitbread Fiction Prize

Moo Pak

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The Big Glass

A meditation on art and its creation, in the form of a series of notes by the artist Harsnet on the making of Big Glass, based on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass and its accompanying notes. Harsnet is a wit and a prankster, and his notes record much of his life at the time in the form of a continuous stream of information and reflection that indiscriminately incorporates shopping lists and other mundane details of his life. The reader sees part of the plot through the marginal notations and explanatory writings of a former fellow artist, Goldberg, now turned critic and teacher, who is transcribing the notes. The careful construction of the novel delivers the story with clarity, along with a good deal of humor, and with an unexpected ending

Only Joking

Alphonse, an accordion-playing ex-clown, is hired by the Baron to spy on his wife, for whom, unknown to the Baron, he is already working. The intricate shadow-play that ensues moves at a pace that quickly blurs the distinctions between jokes and lies, art and evidence, until with a final tug at the strings the characters - barons, clowns, art students, art collectors, film-makers, restaurateurs - are brought into unexpected alignment with their several objects of desire

Migrations

The epigraph is from the Hebrew Bible: "Arise and go, for this is not your rest." (Micah 2:10). A man walks down a deserted road in South London. It is night. He falters, then falls. He lies still under the glare of the street lamps. A man paces up and down an empty room. He pauses at the window, looks down into the sunlit street. Is it the same man? Who is he? Why is he there

Conversations in Another Room

"In a quiet room, in a flat, an old woman lies in bed. Beside her sits her niece, a regular visitor. They gossip and reminisce. They are allies and also antagonists

Goldberg: Variations

Taking his cue from an anecdote connected with Bach's late masterpiece, the Goldberg Variations, Gabriel Josipovici imagines an English Writer at the turn of the eighteenth century, a Jew who is invited to the house of a country gentleman in order to read to him in the evening and send him to sleep. The thirty 'Variations' can be read as disconnected stories on varied topics -- incest in the Orkneys, madness in Chester, a poetic competition at the court of George III, a marital quarrel -- or as a weaving together of past and present until a bizarre climax in achieved

Words

"Louis and Helen's marriage is rubbing along comfortably when an old flame of his, Jo, proposes to pay them a short visit. The suggestion is a little odd: Jo has been out of touch with Louis for years, and she has never met Helen. But Helen seems quite agreeable to the idea, and it's Louis who is somewhat disconcerted, edgy, ready to make difficulties. Jo arrives with her small daughter Gillian, whom she hasn't mentioned, and who proves to be a most disconcerting child, remote and brooding

In a Hotel Garden

In a series of conversations that take place in his friends house in Putney Heath, Ben tells of a vacation to the Dolomites that signalled the end of his relationship with Sand, his girlfriend at the time, but opened up the possibility of a new one with the reserved, even somewhat remote, Liliane, or Lily. She had just been to Siena, looking for a garden in a hotel that was a significant place for her grandmother, a Jewish woman from Constantinople, who spent an ordinary day there, a day that became extraordinary because of the war and its effects on the family. To Lily that day in the hotel garden has become a way for her understand herself, her family, and the Holocaust. Constructed mostly from dialogue, the book presents multiple portraits of Ben, his friends, and the two women, along with a strong sense of the texture of their lives, while unfolding the story of Lily and her grandmother's day in the hotel garden