In her third novel, Ahern (P.S., I Love You and Love, Rosie) employs an imaginary best friend to breathe distinctiveness into an otherwise stereotypical Irish tale. Living in her own house in a small, posh Irish town, 35-year-old Elizabeth Egan is an uptight interior designer and adoptive mother to her six-year-old nephew, Luke, whose mother, Elizabeth's 23-year-old sister, Saoirse, prefers boozing to parenting.
A boy and a girl are tricked into using magic rings. A beautiful and terrifying queen escapes from a dying world. A lion the great lion Aslan sings a new world into existence. And so Narnia is born, and already a dark treachery threatens its future. The Magician s Nephew is the epic prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The plot of this amiable romance is secondary to its style. Wodehouse's masterful language makes high comedy out of situations that would be dull or slapstick in less capable hands. William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish, is hard-up for money. When he is unexpectedly bequeathed a million pounds by an American he once helped at golf, and furthermore learns that the millionaire left his niece and nephew only twenty pounds, he is uneasy. He endeavours to approach them (in then-rural Long Island) and see if he can fix up something, like giving them half the inheritance. He discovers that it can be difficult to give money away...
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 28 January 2011
6
Murder Being Done Once
A Chief Inspector Wexford mystery, in which a girl with no name, no possessions and no past, is found murdered in a vast, overgrown London cemetery. Wexford is in the capital for a rest on doctor's orders, but is drawn into the investigation when his nephew is given charge of the case.