Frances Faviell

A House on the Rhine

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The rubbish in the once-lovely garden, the broken toys, the bicycles against the toppling fence, the neglected, trampled flower-beds - all were highlighted by the merciless midday sun. The house itself, with paint peeling, tiles missing from the roof, its pretentious pillars pitted with gunfire, looked forlorn and neglected. But nothing could detract from the beauty of the acacia trees whose proud flowering dominated the scene and apologized for everything. Having made her publishing debut with The Dancing Bear, a superb memoir of life in Berlin immediately after World War II, Frances Faviell applied first-hand knowledge to fiction, telling the riveting, harrowing tale of one large, troubled family in Germany nearly a decade after the war's end. In a town near Cologne, rebuilding is proceeding at a frantic pace, factory work is plentiful and well-paid, and the dark days of near-starvation have ended. But Joseph, a former Allied prisoner of war, and his enormous brood-his wife having received a medal under the Nazis for bearing more than 10 children-face new problems ranging from the mother's infidelity, the oldest child's involvement with a brutal youth gang leader, and a beloved adopted daughter's plans to marry an American soldier. Vividly portraying the love and conflict of a large family and the dramatic, sometimes tragic social change of Germany's postwar recovery, A House on the Rhine is a powerful, heartbreaking tale from the author of the London Blitz memoir A Chelsea Concerto. This new edition includes an afterword by Frances Faviell's son, John Parker, and other supplementary material. 'Heartrending but irresistible.' Rosaleen Whateley, Liverpool Daily Post 'Extremely fast paced and expertly told … her characters are alive and disturbingly real.' San Francisco Chronicle 'She writes with a sharpness of outline which would not shame Simenon.' J.W. Lambert, Sunday Times

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Dean Street Press
• Seitenzahl: 268
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Oktober 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 289g
• ISBN-13: 9781911413813
• ISBN-10: 1911413813
• Artikelnr.: 45785106

Autorenporträt

Frances Faviell (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hungarian academic and travelled with him to India where she lived for some time at the ashram of Rabindranath Tagore, and visiting Nagaland. She then lived in Japan and China until having to flee from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. She met her second husband Richard Parker in 1939 and married him in 1940. She became a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Phoney War. Due to its proximity to the Royal Hospital and major bridges over the Thames Chelsea was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. She and other members of the Chelsea artists' community were often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events throughout the Blitz. Her experiences of the time were later recounted in the memoir A Chelsea Concerto (1959). After the war, in 1946, she went with her son, John, to Berlin where Richard had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration (the CCG). It was here that she befriended the Altmann Family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.