Arena Books
3 total works
Marise Tomelty is a child-wife who dislikes sex and is terrified of open spaces. Ralph Shilling lives in the flat above the Tomelty's and is a dealer in pesticides. Marise's commercial traveller husband casually mentions that he recognizes Ralph as John Brown, acquitted for lack of evidence of an atrocious double murder. Nevertheless, Marise encourages Ralph's attentions, in need of the exciting combination of passion and fear. A serious exploration of the nature of our experience of ourselves and each other, of the tug between body and soull, life and death, truth and fantasy, this is an extraordinary novel written in the precise ,impeccable prose for which A L Barker is so famed.
Doug and Dulcie Bysshe are twins. Doug - or Bysshe - is now a successful film star living in the South of France and contemplating a new part as a saintly doctor in an African leper colony. Dulcie, busy, energetic, is fighting to retrieve her husband, the mournful and ineffective Pike, who has absconded to Nice with the adolescent Cherrimay Pugh. At the centre of events is the Gooseboy, a creature with a double face, half faun, half deformed horror...Both elegant and grotesque, funny and appalling, THE GOOSEBOY questions the relations between flesh and spirit, the ridiculous and the terrible. A L Barker watches shrewdly and judges from a distance, her pithy and particular prose shining through.
In a parish of wealthy women, Rose Antrobus forms a committee to decide who should benefit from a small bequest left to charity. Secretly she hopes the money will go to the Peachey family - a mother cruelly abandoned and looking after her three young children on a pittance. But the situation isn't as simple as all that, and soon it causes unexpceted ructions and confrontations - and Rose finds herself turning back the clock to remember a childhood vacation spent at the Marigny chateau in France ... a vacation which, thirty years later, is to provide the solution to her dilemma.
'The dialogue is subtle and the atmosphere of the French visits economically and brilliantly conveyed.' A. S. Byatt
'The dialogue is subtle and the atmosphere of the French visits economically and brilliantly conveyed.' A. S. Byatt