Search Results

“... No one, certainly not a novelist like Philip Oakes, can resist the temptation to rearrange memories, impose some sort of order or pattern. In the same way that a novelist may write about his own life, disguising it as a tale about imaginary people, autobiography may be a sly form of fiction. And it follows that the success of an autobiography depends on whether or not he makes a good story of it ...”

“... It is an entertaining and rewarding experience to look at the reissue of Nina Bawden’s George beneath a Paper Moon immediately before her most recent novel, The Ice-House. A decade separates the two books. The text of The Ice-House bristles with those tiny signs of contemporaneity that remind us, all the time, that this is a chronicle of the Eighties, while its predecessor has begun to acquire the period patina of the early Seventies ...”

“... and is obsessed with funerals. This is fairly sophisticated humour, and perhaps a little strained. Nina Bawden has always excelled at persons and places, and in The Robbers she has created some that will give much pleasure. Here is Philip living with his grandmother in a grace-and-favour apartment in a castle by the sea. The young and the old are in ...”

“... to say this, and to the outsider it hardly seems borne out by the facts. The initial mistake in Nina Bawden’s Walking naked is to allow Laura to tell her own story. This grudging, mean-spirited, resentful and destructive personage has already got rid of one husband and set of children before the story begins, and by the time it ends she seems well on ...”

“... first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about geriatrics (the only remarkable book ...”