Oleander Jacaranda

A poignant and bittersweet memoir from the distinguished British fiction writer Penelope Lively, "Oleander, Jacaranda" evokes the author' s unusual childhood growing up English in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. Filled with the birds, animals and planets of the Nile landscape that the author knew as a child, "Oleander, Jacaranda" follows the young Penelope from a visit to a "fellaheen" village to an afternoon at the elegant Gezira Sporting Club, one milieu as exotic to her as the other. Lively' s memoir offers us the rare opportunity to accompany a gifted writer on a journey of exploration into the mysterious world of her own childhood.

Lively's memoir of her unusual childhood in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s while exploring the nature of childhood perception.

Responding to the demands of the Framework for Teaching English, Years 7-9, within the context of the revised National Curriculum, the Level Best series offers a carefully structured and motivating approach to English for Key Stage 3.

An acclaimed international bestseller, The Perfume Garden is a sensuously written story of lost love, family secrets—and the art of creating a perfect scent. High in the hills of Valencia, a forgotten house guards its secrets. Untouched since Franco's forces tore through Spain in 1936, the whitewashed walls have crumbled, and the garden, laden with orange blossom, grows wild. Emma Temple is the first to unlock its doors in seventy years. Emma is London's leading perfumier, but her blessed life has taken a difficult turn. Her free-spirited mother, Liberty, who taught her the art of fragrance making, has just passed away. At the same time, she broke up with her long-time lover and business partner, Joe, whose baby she happens to be carrying. While Joe is in New York trying to sell his majority share in their company, Emma, guided by a series of letters and a key bequeathed to her in Liberty's will, decides to leave her job and travel to Valencia, where she will give birth in the house her mother mysteriously purchased just before her death. The villa is a perfect retreat: redolent with the exotic scents of orange blossom and neroli, dappled with light and with the rich colors of a forgotten time. Emma makes it her mission to restore the place to its former glory. But for her aging grandmother, Freya, a British nurse who stayed in Valencia during Spain's devastating civil war, Emma's new home evokes memories of a terrible secret, a part of her family's past that until now has managed to stay hidden. With two beautifully interwoven narratives and a lush, atmospheric setting, Kate Lord Brown's The Perfume Garden is a dramatic, emotional debut that readers won't soon forget.

The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War. Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to 'go home' to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives. Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives. By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker's study asks what it means to be 'at home' in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai's International Settlement. These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the habitations and detritus of everyday life, from mansions and modest railway huts, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms, and photograph albums. Exploring works by Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, this study establishes new connections between authors usually discussed for their fiction, and who have been hitherto unrecognised as post-imperial life writers. Offering close, sustained analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, and autofictions, and identifying new subgenres such as 'speculative life writing', this book advances rich new readings of autobiographical narrative. By tracing the continuing importance of colonialism to white subjectivity, the role of imperial memory in Britain, and the ways that these unsettling forces move beneath the surface of modern and contemporary literature, this study offers new conceptual insights to the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.

Paradise is commonly imagined as a place of departure or arrival, beginning and closure, permanent inhabitation of which, however much desired, is illusory. This makes it the dream of the traveller, the explorer, the migrant – hence, a trope recurrent in postcolonial writing, which is so centrally concerned with questions of displacement and belonging. Projections of Paradise documents this concern and demonstrates the indebtedness of writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, Cyril Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Amitav Ghosh, James Goonewardene, Romesh Gunesekera, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Janette Turner Hospital, Penelope Lively, Fatima Mernissi, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, M.G. Vassanji, and Rudy Wiebe to strikingly similar myths of fulfilment. In writing, directly or indirectly, about the experience of migration, all project paradises as places of origin or destination, as homes left or not yet found, as objects of nostalgic recollection or hopeful anticipation. Yet in locating such places, quite specifically, in Egypt, Zanzibar, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the Sundarbans, Canada, the Caribbean, Queensland, Morocco, Tuscany, Russia, the Arctic, the USA, and England, they also subvert received fantasies of paradise as a pleasurable land rich with natural beauty. Projections of Paradise explores what happens to these fantasies and what remains of them as postcolonial writings call them into question and expose the often hellish realities from which popular dreams of ideal elsewheres are commonly meant to provide an escape. Contributors: Vera Alexander, Gerd Bayer, Derek Coyle, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Ursula Kluwick, Janne Korkka, Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz, Sofia Muñoz-Valdieso, Susanne Pichler, Helga Ramsey-Kurz, Ulla Ratheiser, Petra Tournay-Thedotou.

By means of contextualized readings, this work argues that autobiographic writing allows an intimate access to processes of colonization and decolonization, incorporation and resistance, and the formation and reformation of identities which occurs in postcolonial space. The book explores the interconnections between race, gender, autobiography and colonialism and uses a method of reading which looks for connections between very different autobiographical writings to pursue constructions of blackness and whiteness, femininity and masculinity, and nationality. Unlike previous studies of autobiography which focus on a limited Euro American canon, the book brings together contemporary and 19th-century women's autobiographies and travel writing from Canada, the Caribbean, Kenya, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. With emphasis on the reader of autobiography as much as the subject, it argues that colonization and resistance are deeply embedded in thinking about the self.

This book offers a unique analysis of the wide-ranging responses of British novelists to the East-West conflict. Hammond analyses the treatment of such geopolitical currents as communism, nuclearism, clandestinity, decolonisation and US superpowerdom, and explores the literary forms which writers developed to capture the complexities of the age.

The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Kathryn Harrison's controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours "the age of memoir." And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity, and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are. Using life writings as examples—including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom, and Philip Roth—Paul John Eakin draws on the latest research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology, and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one's body shapes one's identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.

The essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world For six decades the Penguin Modern Classics series has been an era-defining, ever-evolving series of books, encompassing works by modernist pioneers, avant-garde iconoclasts, radical visionaries and timeless storytellers. This reader's companion showcases every title published in the series so far, with more than 1,800 books and 600 authors, from Achebe and Adonis to Zamyatin and Zweig. It is the essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world, and the companion volume to The Penguin Classics Book. Bursting with lively descriptions, surprising reading lists, key literary movements and over two thousand cover images, The Penguin Modern Classics Book is an invitation to dive in and explore the greatest literature of the last hundred years.