Book description
Joe Beech, a London publisher, is in his fifties. Strong and healthy,
married for twenty-five years with two grown children, with many friends
and attractive to women, his life would seem good - yet he is haunted by
a sense of pain and foreboding.
A family skiing holiday in Austria with friends seems to promise
respite, yet under the brightness of the snow, the physical
exhilaration, the shared jokes and memories from other holidays,
something dark still seems to be working. Whom or what are threatened?
His children? His son’s beautiful girlfriend? His marriage? An old
friend? Himself? In the six days in the mountains which, physically and
temporally, form the book’s compass, Joe finds himself travelling far
back in his mind to re-visit the past: as a young child in 1939 he was
despatched from this same country to the safety of England by his Jewish
parents, never to return except as a stranger. For him, Vienna, his
birthplace, has become loaded with the significance of a city known only
from dreams, and the prospect of spending some days there after the
holiday - and secretly meeting a woman-friend there - fills him with
both excitement and dread. In what sense will this be the journey’s end?
What, finally, is waiting there for him?
Gillian Tindall has always been interested in the way in which people
are governed by past events, by their own perception of those events and
by their complex relationships with places. To The City
is one of her finest and most subtly constructed novel to date.
‘Remarkable for its penetration into another world, another life.’ Spectator
‘Tindall’s novel is powerful, intricate, skilled and moving.’
Publishing News
‘Desperately true to life . . . wholly convincing, full of thought,
feeling and wisdom.’ Sunday Times
Gillian Tindall began her career as a prize-winning novelist. She has
continued to publish fiction but has also staked out an impressive
territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of
place.
Her The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village
which first appeared thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print;
nor has Celestine: Voices from a French Village
, published in the mid 1990s and translated into several languages, for
which she was decorated by the French government.
Well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of
her research, Gillian is a master of miniaturist history. She lives with
her husband in London.
