Picture of author.

Georgina Harding

Autor(a) de Painter of Silence

9 Works 704 Membros 46 Críticas

About the Author

Obras por Georgina Harding

Painter of Silence (2012) 293 exemplares
The Solitude of Thomas Cave (2007) 193 exemplares
The Spy Game (2009) 152 exemplares
The Gun Room (2016) 16 exemplares
Land of the Living (2018) 16 exemplares
Harvest (2021) 4 exemplares
L'Homme sans mots (2013) 1 exemplar

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome canónico
Harding, Georgina
Data de nascimento
1955
Sexo
female
Nacionalidade
UK
Local de nascimento
Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, UK
Locais de residência
Stour Valley, Essex, UK
London, England, UK
Ocupações
novelist
travel writer

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From Bloomsbury Publishing: Georgina Harding is the author of three novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game and, most recently, Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Her first book was a word of non-fiction, In Another Europe, recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime. It was followed by Tranquebar: A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a small fishing village on the Coromandel coast. Georgina Harding lives in London and on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.

Membros

Críticas

Sparsely written, yet touching to the core. This is a novel about a displaced mother, who disappears in the fog when her son and daughter are still at a young age. Anna and Peter speculate about their mother’s mysterious disappearance and her origins – could she be a spy, secretly working for the Russians?

The novel is set in both the early to mid 1960s, when the mom disappears and in the post cold war era, when Anna, now a married mom herself, travels to Berlin and Kaliningrad (Konigsberg) to see what she can reconstruct of her deceased mom’s life. The very fact that their dad did not take them to the funeral and graveside (until much later) provides ground for wild speculation – the kids know that their mom originally came from Germany, their parents met in 1947 in Berlin, and they grow up at a time when The Cambridge spy network hits the news big time. Could their mom be a sleeper spy, found out and erased from their lives? Did their mom flee and go back to Russia? Why does Anna have to go to a piano teacher, Sarah Cahn, who must be a Jewish German immigrant herself, and possibly another spy colluding with their dad (and missing mom)? Sarah Cahn has a mysterious Hungarian visitor, who gets stuck, snowed-in for months during the tough winter of 1963 – Is he yet another spy? When the kids go to Oxford for a shopping trip, they think they recognize their mom’s coat – worn by a woman they cannot distinguish very well, who links up with the Hungarian man. Especially Peter gets estranged from his home, because of the mysteries surrounding his missing mom – he escapes from boarding school at some stage, getting caught in Hook of Holland, on the run.

Much later, when her dad has died and Peter has moved abroad (in Hong Kong?), Anna finally gets to go on her own travel to Berlin and Kaliningrad, trying to discover traces of her mother’s life, piecing together tidbits of recollections, stories, and some trinkets she left behind. By coincidence she meets a nice elderly German couple in Kaliningrad that proves helpful, taking her to the local archives, to localize her mother’s place in old, but gone, Konigsberg. And then suddenly all falls in place – a life-long jigsaw is solved – her mom had a cat like trinket with a very German name, and that name proves to belong to an old woman (grandma?) living on the 5th floor of a building described by Anna’s mom. The old woman’s son lived below stairs and was a highly ranked SS officer. And then the secretive behaviour of Anna’s mother starts to make sense.

Not the first book I read by Georgina Harding, which explores a bit of niche with her novels on war, memory, trauma and the intergenerational experience of such. My previous read of hers was the Painter of Silence, which I considered impressive.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
alexbolding | 11 outras críticas | Mar 22, 2024 |
Georgina Harding is the author the Orange Prize shortlisted Painter of Silence (2012), and I have Kim from Reading Matters to thank for introducing me to this fine author. The Gun Room (2016) is Harding's fourth novel, and I have her Land of the Living (2018) on the TBR too.

I suppose we have the marketing department to thank for the misleading cover design. There is a Japanese girl in the novel, and yes, she does travel on trains, and indeed it does rain a lot, but the book is actually about a traumatised young war photographer. A cover design featuring him would probably attract a different sort of gung-ho readership, but that might be no bad thing since the book reveals the cost of war long after the last shot has been fired.

Anyway...

Jonathan has made his name and a lot of money out of his photographs of a war crime during the Vietnam War. (The My Lai Massacre is never mentioned, but it would be in most readers' minds, and those of us of a certain age will have vivid memories of the photos we saw at the time.) Jonathan was young and naïve and utterly unprepared for what he might see, but he manages to capture that same sense of shock and horror in one of the soldiers — who witnessed, and possibly participated in the atrocity. Jonathan remains haunted by what he has seen, and abandoning his brother and widowed mother on the family farm in England, he travels in Asia, trying to exorcise his demons.

He fetches up in Tokyo, where the order and restraint and predictability of what he sees brings him some solace. He gets work teaching English, and he meets a girl called Kumiko, who shows him the sights and introduces him to her family. With whom he is careful not to mention that his father hated the Japanese because he had fought against them in Burma... where Kumiko's grandfather was a soldier too.

In Painter of Silence, the main character is a deaf-mute, and there are many silences in this novel too.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/14/the-gun-room-2016-by-georgina-harding/
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
anzlitlovers | 1 outra crítica | Jul 13, 2023 |
Although still in his mid-twenties, Jonathan has already received acclaim as a photographer in Vietnam War. Having grown disillusioned with this calling, he spends some time as a language teacher in Tokyo, and then returns to the farm in Norfolk where he grew up. His father died, allegedly in a “shooting accident” when Jonny was just seven, but his mother Claire still lives there, together with his elder brother Richard, who now runs the farm. Jonny is soon joined by Kimiko, his Japanese girlfriend, who has heard much about her partner’s past and his childhood home and now has the chance to experience them for herself:

She had asked him to tell her about his home, many times. She wanted to know so that she could know him better, so that she had some world to fit him into, that he came from, so that he had some dimension deeper than being just an Englishman who had come to Japan…

The couple decide to stay on to help with the harvest, before resuming their travels. But rain delays the job and a brief English holiday becomes, for Kumiko, a summer among a family with its fair share of secrets, a family haunted by its past.

Although recounted in the third person, the novel’s point of view keeps changing throughout, presenting us with the different perspectives of the four main characters. It starts and ends in Kumiko’s voice and yet her character is – ironically, and deliberately – the one which remains most mysterious, the one which we least get to know on a personal level. For the other characters including, one suspects, Jonathan himself, Kumiko remains “the Japanese girl”, an outsider, a glitch in an otherwise English pastoral. But, precisely because of her “foreignness” Kumiko becomes a catalyst for the family, leading them to face an uncomfortable past. The secrets which Charlie, Jonny's father, took to the grave, remain something of a mystery - that part of the story is recounted in Harding's Land of the Living (to which Harvest is a sequel, albeit a "free-standing one").

This novel is a little gem which I enjoyed at so many different levels. Jonathan is a photographer and, appropriately, the descriptions have a strong “visual” element, occasionally vibrant with yellows and golds, at other times “grey and brown and ochre… black even”. Nature is not only vividly portrayed but, as in a Hardy novel, it becomes almost a character in itself, a timeless backdrop to the family drama which plays out in the novel.

I loved the tone of the novel: melancholy, wistful and poignant. Harding subtly conveys the complicated psychological strands which link the characters, particularly Claire’s fraught relationship with her late husband and the underlying rivalry between the brothers whose life-story is indelibly marked by the tragic death of their father. The title of the novel is not just a reference to the literal “harvest”, in which Jonny and Kumiko participate, but becomes a metaphorical one, as the family reaps the seeds sown in its past.

Understated, yet complex and satisfying, Georgina Harding’s “Harvest” is a novel to watch (and read) in 2021.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2020/09/Harvest-by-Georgina-Harding.html
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
JosephCamilleri | 1 outra crítica | Feb 21, 2023 |
Oy vey. A death match between Stoner and Moby Dick was never going to work for me, and nearly pitched my reading slump into a full blown coma. All I wanted was a book about Svalbard! Can someone please write a chick lit novel set in modern times on the island, please? Miserable white men need not apply and definitely no animal cruelty ('hey, here's a vomit-inducing description of a baby seal being skinned alive, which will be repeated later on in the book because grr, two for one deal on the macho bullshit'). The author gets a bonus point for fully embracing the nineteenth century style of drawn out expositional narrative, however - I hated every page, but the dedication was full on.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
AdonisGuilfoyle | 9 outras críticas | Nov 27, 2022 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
9
Membros
704
Popularidade
#35,974
Avaliação
½ 3.6
Críticas
46
ISBN
67
Línguas
4

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