Book description
When George Goodnight, a lawyer on the staff of a London newspaper,
finds his marriage has gone sour, his family holiday is cancelled and
his car, broken down on the motorway, has been stolen, he walks
through a gate in a fence on a summer's day in the middle of England.
What he doesn't know, as he takes his first light steps across the
sunlit meadows near the tiny village of Somerbourne Magna, is that he
is embarking on a course that will take him far away from the country,
the surroundings and the way of life he has always known. He is
embarking on a journey that will eventually take him to the other side
of the world.
As in his earlier books, Arthur McCann and All His Women, Bare
Nell and Ormerod's Landing, Leslie Thomas shows himself
to be a master of the sustained narrative novel of adventure and
romance as he evokes his hero's fitful progress round the world. Along
the way George has close encounters with storms at sea and in the air;
with poverty and despair; with true love and exotic passion. He spends
Christmas in prison, encounters a substitute for the son he never had
and tracks down a girl who was swopped at birth for some rare stamps.
Always he moves on.
Sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious, sometimes alarming, the
adventures of George Goodnight and his shadowy alter ego, Oliver
Loving, represent stages in what is both a quest for excitement and
love and a haunting evocation of what happens when a man starts
running away from life and can't stop. The descriptions of the cities
and villages George travels to and the extraordinary cast of people he
encounters are sparkling and authentic. This long, swirling novel,
with comedy in its buttonhole and pathos at its heart, is a tour de
force and wonderfully enthralling read.
Leslie Thomas was born in 1931 in Newport, Monmouthshire, the son of
a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is
evoked in
This Time Next Week
, published in 1964. At sixteen he became a reporter, before going on to
do his National Service. His novels include:
The Virgin Soldiers,
Orange Wednesday, The Love Beach, Come to the War, His Lordship
and
The Man with the Power.
