...any of the books I bought on Saturday? All of them appealed, as I was browsing the Oxfam bookshop after work, but I don't know anything about any of them, except what I was able to glean from the blurbs. I figured that Oxfam would benefit from my monies, even if I eventually decided not to read the books....
A Dark Strange by Julien Gracq
This one is the one which most intrigues me. It's a beautiful Pushkin Press edition, a translation of a French novel from 1945. Here is the blurb:
Two lovers arrive at a seaside hotel in 1920s Brittany; the other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realise who he is - that death has come to spend the summer with them.
Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves, the August heat and the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan - an uncannily contemporary figure - gradually disintegrates.
My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq
I've just spotted that both those authors' names end with '-cq'. That can't be all that common. Another novel from the French, this 1998 work has an appalling title, but I was again pulled in by a surreal element. One more blurb, if you will:
What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, completely vanished? When would you begin to panic - the first hour, the first night? Or the moment you realise you cannot even remember his face?
Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
This one comes with no information at all! So I bought it because I've been meaning to read more Cather, and because I'm a sucker for tatty old green hardbacks - which once, if my eyes do not deceive me, had a Boots Book Club sticker on the front.
If you know anything about these, then get commentin'! And, if you don't, perhaps you'd like to comment anyway...
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