Georgina Harding
Autor(a) de Painter of Silence
About the Author
Obras por Georgina Harding
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
Fatal error: Call to undefined function isLitsy() in /var/www/html/inc_magicDB.php on line 425- 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
Listas
Prémios
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 9
- Membros
- 704
- Popularidade
- #35,974
- Avaliação
- 3.6
- Críticas
- 46
- ISBN
- 67
- Línguas
- 4
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)