| BARBARA VINE |
YEAR
|
TITLE
|
1986
|
|
A
DARK ADAPTED EYE: Like most families they had their secrets and
hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess
that Vera Hillyard and her beautiful sister, Eden, were locked in a
dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the
fifties was not kind to women who erred…so they had to fight it out
behind closed curtains using every weapon they had. R87
|
| 1987 |
|
A FATAL INVERSION: The long hot
summer of 1976. In a haphazard way Adam Verne-Smith collects around him
a group of young people at Wyvis Hall, a big old country house in
Suffolk. With the carelessness of youth, Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and
Zosie hardly ask themselves or each other what they are doing, why they
are there, how they are to live. They scavenge, they steal, they pawn
and sell the family heirlooms. They exist. Within the charmed circle of
the invisible walls that divide them from the village, London, their
families and their own future lives, their group splinters, reforms,
cracks - each individual struggling to survive as the heat - wave
mercilessly continues. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and a
child are discovered in the bizarre animal cemetery by the new owners
of Wyvis Hall. Which woman? Whose child? As the police make their
inquiries, Adam Verne-Smith senses that the arm of retribution is to
grasp him at last. Rufus and the others have their own reasons for
fear, as the events of 1976 unfold. R87
|
| 1988 |
|
THE HOUSE OF STAIRS: Dark and
impenetrable as the bloodstone, the brooding, sensual atmosphere
surrounding Cosette breeds desire, mistrust, conspiracy…After the
sudden death of her wealthy husband Cosette, pampered and much-loved,
buys a large, dilapidated house in London, just as the sixties are
drawing to a close. Her young cousin Elizabeth, curiously isolated,
comes to stay; it is she who now recalls the story of The House of
Stairs: the much-balconied, many-windowed five-storey house with its
exquisite grey garden. To it, with the added lure of Cosette's bounty,
are drawn all manner of hangers-on, most of them careless young people
dazed by life, love and drugs. Bell Sanger seems at first to be just
one of the many, but then there was always something different,
something more than just her total frankness, that set her apart. Ever
more sinister questions begin to surface: what happened to Elizabeth's
mother and what is it Elizabeth fears so greatly? Why was Bell
imprisoned, and what is the secret of her past she zealously keeps
hidden - perhaps even from herself? Can the uncanny resemblance between
Bell and a Bronzino portrait have any connection with the dying heroine
in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove and her resemblance to the
portrait? Life, it is said, imitates art, but surely here it must just
be a coincidence ... ? R88
|
| 1990 |
|
GALLOWGLASS: 'The Prince,' said
Sandor to Little Joe, 'was an old man when our story begins. ' 'Sander
is good, even excellent, at story-telling. Sandor is wonderful, too;
dark, thick short hair, with marvellous hands, long and thin, like a
woman's - a great smile. Once you've seen Sandor, no one else will do.'
Little Joe - loving, eager to please and learn - is ready to listen.
The power of the educated over the simple is horribly clear in this
disturbing and unusual relationship. As Sandor's motivation - both for
rescuing Little Joe and then for weaving his spell of words - becomes
clear, the darkness surrounding him is too much for them both and for
the beautiful ex-model sequestered in her Suffolk mansion by an
obsessive husband. The author draws these diverse personalities into a
tight conflict of loyalties. A net of love, of fear and greed and
desire, closes around them in a Suffolk landscape so exquisitely
rendered as to heighten painfully the contrast between man and the
natural world. Barbara Vine shows us the world as it is, and also
through her writing we sense how it might be; her powerful moral
vision, while showing us the worst, gives us back a knowledge of how to
act for the right. R90 RR92
|
| 1991 |
|
KING SOLOMON'S CARPET: Jarvis
lives
in
a big old house with a bell tower, overlooking the Jubilee
line. He loves the tube with all its secrets - its hidden tunnels, its
mysterious 'ghost' stations, its spectacular incidents and frightening
accidents. The house was once a school, but now he lets out rooms.
People gather there from the tube. There is Tom, the lost busker, and
Jed, who keeps the hawk and uses the trains in the night hours; Jasper
and the truant boys riding terrifyingly high above the tracks; and
Alice, who wants to forget the baby she has deserted. Then there is
Axel, who is an enigma. Axel hates the Underground - he goes down there
simply to remind himself how much he hates it, riding around,
formulating his plan. In King Solomon s Carpet this group of people are
brought together, the diverse strands of their lives woven into a story
that enthrals from its first moment. The chillingly unusual and the
seemingly ordinary combine to create a tale of disconcerting complexity
and sinister charge. It is Barbara Vine's awesome gift to make the
familiar seem shocking and oppressive. Experiences of breathtaking
power lie in wait for the reader. Straight out of nightmare, they are
made alarmingly real. This is Barbara Vine's dark vision of London in
which apparently unconnected events are relentlessly drawn together.
R91 RR93 RR07/11
|
| 1993 |
|
ASTA'S BOOK (aka ANNA'S BOOK):
Barbara Vine's latest triumphantly gripping tale spans three
generations, from early beginnings in the East End to present-day
London. It is 1905. Asta and Rasmus have come to Hackney from Denmark
with their two little boys. While Rasmus travels abroad on business,
Asta keeps her loneliness and isolation at bay by writing her diary in
this strange house in a strange land. These diaries, published over
seventy years later, will, by an act of chance, uncover the truth of an
unsolved crime and much else besides. As Asta's granddaughter reads the
diaries they reveal to her unknown facets of the woman she thought she
knew. Passing reference is made to a Mrs Roper, who lived near Asta in
east London. Coincidentally, a documentary film is underway about an
unsolved murder from the turn of the century - that of Lizzie Roper -
and the subsequent disappearance of her daughter. Will this fragmentary
evidence throw light on one of the century's most notorious trials and
even solve another puzzle: who was Asta's daughter Swanny and what was
the mystery of her background? In Asta and Swanny, Barbara Vine has
created two of her most enduring characters to date. Using the
conventions of true crime, murder mystery and autobiography to create a
deft interplay between past and present, she lifts aside each layer of
time's concealing patina on a superbly wrought journey into the hidden
corners of others' secrets and the consequences when those secrets are
dragged into the light. R93
|
| 1994 |
|
NO NIGHT IS TOO LONG: 'The truth is
that we only care about someone's pain when we like him or when we
don't know him personally and have no reason for liking or disliking. I
observed Ivo's pain but I didn't care about it .. .' In a silent,
ghostly house overlooking the grey expanse of the North Sea, a young
man sits down each evening to write his confession: a confession he
will never be able to complete. For Tim Cornish, once a favoured
graduate of England's most prestigious creative-writing course, even
the wildest flights of imagination cannot provide an escape. Two years
later, he waits for his crime to be discovered. And he knows that
redemption will never be his ... Yet Tim's adult life had begun so
promisingly. A chance meeting during his first year at university. A
sudden flaring of passion, a stolen kiss. Within a month of meeting
palaeontologist Ivo Steadman, Tim had moved into his flat. Was it here
that love turned to disgust? 'He loved me, therefore I loved him no
longer ... '. Or was it later, on a wide empty sea somewhere at the
edge of the world? Ivo spent his summers lecturing on the cruise ships
in Alaska. It was Ivo's idea that Tim should join him; Ivo's mistake
that left Tim dangerously alone. For in Alaska Tim met someone else;
someone who loved him ... and someone he could love. From that moment,
Tim was able to find the strength to end a night that had already
lasted for ever and to begin his sentence in hell. With the haunting
power of a Greek tragedy, Barbara Vine unfolds a gripping tale of love
and death - and the death throes of love. And with unerring surgical
precision, she exposes the fears that lurk in us all.R94
R97
|
| 1995 |
|
IN THE TIME OF HIS PROSPERITY:
Novella
|
| 1995 |
|
THE BRIMSTONE WEDDING: Unlike the
other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is smart and elegant and in
control. She keeps her secrets to herself, revealing nothing of her
past. Only Jenny, her young care assistant, seems aware that her heart
harbours a dark, painful mystery. And only she can prevent Stella from
carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny slowly pieces
together the answers to many questions that arise. Why does Stella seem
so afraid of driving? Why has she kept possession of a house that
nobody, not even her children, knows about? What happened there that
holds the key to a distant tragedy? As Jenny uses the house to meet her
lover, she discovers untouched items - a painting, a burnt dress, a
decaying car. But only when Stella leaves Jenny her tape recorder, into
which she has recounted the true events of the past, can the truth be
finally - and shockingly - revealed. In this compelling mystery, in
which past and present are skilfully interwoven, Barbara Vine
demonstrates once again her masterly control of both character and
narrative. R96
|
| 1998 |
|
THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER'S BOY: 'Gerald
Francis Candless, OBE, novelist, died July 6 aged 71 ... Candless was
born in Ipswich, Suffolk, the only child of a printer and a nurse,
George and Kathleen Candless, and grew up in that town. He was educated
privately and later at Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained a
degree in classics ... '. The obituaries for Gerald Candless, who had
died of a heart attack just days before he was due to have a bypass
operation, were respectful. He had been, after all, an admired and
popular writer, the subject of students' theses and once a candidate
for - if not ultimately the winner of - the Booker Prize. His sudden
death at his home in north Devon on the cliffs overlooking the sea was
a loss to literature as well as to his family and friends. The trouble
was, as his daughter Sarah soon discovered when she embarked on a
memoir of him, very few of the facts so confidently printed in the
papers were true. Incredible though it might be, and fearful though she
was of the effect her discoveries would have on her mother Ursula and
her rather emotional sister Hope, it seemed that her father had taken
on a different identity at some point in his life ... that he wasn't
Gerald Candless at all. But if he wasn't Gerald Candless, who was he?
And what terrible thing had driven him to conceal his real identity
even from his wife and children? R98
|
| 2000 |
|
GRASSHOPPER: Clodagh was nineteen
when her parents packed her off to college and a relative's house in
north London, two years after the death on the pylon, the worst thing
that had ever happened to her. They blamed her for it, everyone did,
and that was why they were sending her away. Maida Vale was unexpected.
Not the suburban mock-Tudor houses of her imagination, but mansions
like Italian palaces and the towers of a Victorian metropolis. And not
the kind of people to look after a lonely and wayward niece. It was
obvious to Clodagh from the first that her aloof, academic cousin and
his sitcom-star wife saw themselves as being exceptionally helpful in
lending her their dingy basement flat. They knew nothing of her
claustrophobia, that she felt free only in the wide open fields of her
Suffolk home. It was hardly surprising that she fell into the arms of
Michael Silverman, or Silver, as everyone called him. He was generous
and kind and thoughtful too. In his flat at the top of his parents'
house he played host to a strange crew of young drop-outs whose
pleasure was to range the roof tops. It was a happy, heady time until
the moment when, on a trek fifty feet above the street, they looked
into a window and saw a scene that was to lead to a tragedy as great as
the death on the pylon. A kind of mirror-image of Barbara Vine's great
London Underground novel King Solomon's Carpet, Grasshopper is set,
strangely but compellingly, on the roof tops of Maida Vale and its
environs. Against this wonderfully evoked landscape, the lives of a
group of young people become entwined in the haunting atmosphere of a
vintage Barbara Vine novel. R00 R08/11
|
| 2002 |
|
THE BLOOD DOCTOR: Blood is going to
be its theme ... Blood in its metaphysical sense as the conductor of an
inherited title and blood as the transmitter of hereditary disease.
Genes, we'd say now, but not in the nineteenth century when Henry
Nanther was born and grew up and achieved a kind of greatness, not
then. It was blood then. The First Lord Nanther dearly hoped to be the
subject of an admiring posthumous biography. Having built a name for
himself as Queen Victoria's favoured physician - expert on blood
diseases and particularly the royal disease of haemophilia - he
fastidiously set about recording the details of his eminent life,
carefully cataloguing every significant letter, diary and medical essay
that he'd written, apparently offering himself up as an open book. But
when the present Lord Nanther begins to research the life of his
great-grandfather, he soon realises there is little of interest in his
ancestor's dry-as-dust account. Indeed he begins to suspect that these
old records conceal more than they reveal as he comes upon mysteries
and anomalies in almost every decade of his great-grandfather's
personal life. Why did he prefer to marry a lowly solicitor's daughter
rather than the upper-class girl who offered him entry into the social
world he appeared to crave? What was the true explanation for the
appalling tragedy that befell his fiancée? And why did his
apparently successful life end in such pain and sorrow? As Martin
Nanther begins to catch glimpses of 'some monstrous, quite
appalling things' in the blood doctor's past, so he realises that Henry
died a guilty man – carrying a horrific secret to the grave. Set
against the current reform of the House of Lords, which Martin Nanther
witnesses at first hand with a kind of fascinated detachment, The Blood
Doctor weaves effortlessly between the past and the present, public
life and private life. The result is a superbly satisfying novel about
ambition, obsession and bad blood. R02
|
| 2005 |
|
THE MINOTAUR: Kerstin Kvist didn't
quite know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family
at their odd, almost grand, house, Lydstep Old Hall, deep in the Essex
countryside. All that mattered to her then was the fact that it was
near London where her boyfriend lived - she'd come over from Sweden to
keep their affair going. The family turned out to be even odder than
the house: living at home with the widowed Mrs Cosway were her three
unmarried daughters, in thrall to the old lady; but there was also a
mysterious fourth daughter - a widow herself and apparently quite rich
- who came and went infrequently, with ill-disguised contempt for the
others. Even more puzzling, and increasingly upsetting for Kerstin ,
was the position of Mrs Cosway's son, John, a sad, self-absorbed figure
in his thirties who haunted the house. 'There's madness in the family,'
offered one of the daughters as way of explanation, but Kerstin had
trained as a nurse and knew it wasn't right to be administering such
powerful drugs to a vulnerable figure like John. Then, just as she was
beginning to get some inkling of what was going on in the house, a
stranger with a glamorously Bohemian aura moved into the village, and
his presence set the Cosway family on a path to self - destruction. In
Barbara Vine's new book a sympathetic middle-aged Swedish woman
remembers her strange and horrifying stay at an old Essex house almost
forty years before, at a time when the sixties revolution hadn't quite
reached rural England. Compelling in its depiction of the secrets
within an apparently respectable family, The Minotaur is Barbara Vine
on top form. R05
|
| 2008 |
|
THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT: Mention his
name and most people will say, 'Who?' while the rest think for a bit
and ask if he 'wasn't the one who got involved in all that sleaze back
whenever it was ... ?' It's late spring of 1990 and a love affair
is flourishing between Ivor Tesham, a thirty-three-year-old rising star
of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, and Hebe Furnal, a
stunning North London housewife stuck in a dull marriage. What
excitement Hebe lacks at home, however, is amply compensated for by the
well-bred and intensely attractive Tesham - an ardent womaniser and
ambitious politician. On the eve of her twenty-eighth birthday, Tesham
decides to give Hebe a present to remember: something far more
memorable than, say, the costly string of pearls he's already lavished
upon her, involving a fashionable new practice known as 'adventure
sex'. A man arranges for his unsuspecting but otherwise willing
girlfriend to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and
delivered to him at a mutually agreed venue ... Set amidst an age of
IRA bombings, the first Gulf War and sleazy politics, The Birthday
Present is the gripping story of a fall from grace, and of a man who
carries within him all the hypocrisy, greed and self-obsession of a
troubled era. R08
|