a jealous god
a place in italy
A01=Simon Mawer
Author_Simon Mawer
booker prize author
british novelist
Category=FB
Category=FBA
Category=FH
Category=FR
Category=FXB
chimera
coming of age
cyprus
dee denham
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
eq_romance
eq_thrillers
gregor mendel
historical fiction
mckitterick prize
mendel's dwarf
prague spring
simon mawer
swimming to ithaca
the bitter cross
the fall
the girl who fell from the sky
the glass room
the gospel of judas
tightrope
walter scott prize
Product details
- ISBN 9780349119236
- Weight: 250g
- Dimensions: 129 x 200mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jun 2007
- Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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On her deathbed, Dee Denham, at one time the toast of colonial Cyprus, tells her son Thomas that her illness is a punishment. Compelled by grief and a confused childhood memory of betrayal, Thomas finds himself searching for the meaning of her last words. He searches through faded photographs and love letters, seeks out survivors and examines his own imperfect recollections. A vanished world comes to life: the restless, seductive island of Cyprus at the end of Empire, a place of oleander and carob trees, cocktails at the Harbour Club and adultery in shuttered bedrooms, peopled by ghostly admirers and conspirators, lovers and spies. Dee's story, an intimate history of violence and tenderness for which Thomas finds himself quite unprepared, gathers momentum, against, in the background, the ominous roar of approaching disaster. A vivid evocation of the past and a deft examination of the dangerous power of memory, SWIMMING TO ITHACA sets fragile human relationships against the unstoppable force of history and sheds new light on both.
Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He now lives with his wife and two children in Italy, and teaches at the English School in Rome.
