Patrick White: The Hanging Garden

UK 2012, 224 pp., hardbound, € 19.99
Kostenloser Versand ab 20 Euro Bestellwert.
Jonathan Cape
Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from WWII. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz Krieg. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world. With the tenderness and rigour of an old, wise novelist, the most important gay author of Australia explores the world of children, the city of his childhood and the experience of war. »The Hanging Garden« is a previously unpublished novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author. It is also unfinished because White put the novel aside at a point and how he planned to finish it remains a mystery.

Alison Bechdel: Are You My Mother?

A Comic Drama. USA 2012, 290 pp., hardbound, € 22.95
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
Jonathan Cape
Alison Bechdel's »Fun Home« was a literary phenomenon: an intimate account of family secrets. While »Fun Home« explored the cartoonist's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this new memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood, and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, when she was seven. Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic British psychoananlyst Donald Winnicott, to an explosively illuminating Dr Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) lesbian love life.