Bøger udgivet af Michael Walmer

Cuffy Mahony is a young boy in country Victoria in the late nineteenth century. He lost his father just under a year ago, and his mother is feeling the heat a little, both in looking after him and his little sister Luce, and in maintaining her job as the village postmistress. But they manage as best they can, with the help of their live-in maid Bowey.Mary Mahony struggles proudly to keep up the standards set when her husband Richard was alive. He had been in his last years a difficult man, and in some senses she is aware of a feeling of newfound freedom. But she does worry about her children and what will become of them on her small wage.She finally decides that the time has come for her to take leave and find a good school with a scholarship for Cuffy in Melbourne. Her house-proudness means that the place must be spruced up, so that her temporary replacement won't get a poor impression. With intense industry she sets about a major tidy and painting job. One day, up a ladder, she reaches over a little too far, and comes crashing down heavily onto the floor. This minor disaster starts a chain of events that will alter irredeemably all their lives.With extraordinarily lucid and forceful prose, Henry Handel Richardson charts the inner worlds of mother and son as they attempt to overcome their fears and face life without becoming too cowed by doubt. The End of a Childhood is both a pendant piece to Richardson's great trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, and readable separately as a delicate, heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of a crucial nexus in the life of a family.

Selected by Evelyn Waugh in the Sunday Times as the best first novel of 1953, and phenomenally praised by critics on its first publication, Hugo Charteris' A Share of the World is one of the great lost novels. This is the first republication in a concerted programme of bringing all of Charteris' works back into print. This harrowing story of a man lost in his times, bewildered and anguished by both war and love, is a masterful portrayal of the human psyche at odds with itself. John Grant has a short war. In a matter of three or four days his career as an officer in active service is over, after a disastrous sortie in the Italian campaign in which one of his men is let down terribly. Back home, reeling with dislocation and yearning, John seeks solace, absolution, a future, and most importantly, love. His troubled mind is taken up with the fascinating and elusive Jane Matlock, whose evasions and temptations lead him into what seems like a new assault-course, a strikingly different form of combat. Although John's story is astonishingly powerful and deeply moving, this extraordinary book has one more ace up its sleeve: Hugo Charteris' intense, atmospheric, drily witty and emotionally searching style. In it there are ingredients which make for one of the great experiences of post-war British literature. A Share of the World burst onto the 1950s literary scene like a truth-incendiary. The author's daughter, Jane Charteris, looks back at this brilliant book, and provides a unique personal insight into its author, in an introduction written specially for this edition.

In 1827 youthful, vigorous John Holdsworth, newly married to his sweetheart Dolly, leaves the village of Southbourne in Kent for his next adventure at sea on board the Meteor, bound for America. He is young to be a chief mate, but all the crew, and his superiors, are impressed with his skill, knowledge and strong, kind leadership. But well out into the Atlantic disaster strikes unexpectedly and the ship founders. The three boats are launched and capable John takes charge of one of them, containing seven people. Ten long days later, John's boat is finally spotted. Of the two remaining on board, the only one alive is John. What he has been through has changed him completely; having had no food and water for many days, and having witnessed unspeakable horrors of searing privation, he is wizened, sunken, white-haired, virtually crippled - and barely alive. Crucially, he has been so near to death that his memory is completely gone. He is taken to Australia on board the vessel of his rescuers with no idea of his name, the name of his ship, or any clue as to his connections. It is as though his mind has sealed off the past. After five years under an assumed name as a clerk in a Sydney company, something tells him that he needs to return to England. There, in 1832, a chance meeting in a London tavern triggers a tiny rush of recognition. He starts out for Kent, little realizing what a moving train of events his regaining of memory will set in motion... First published in 1875.

Stella Benson's debut was one of the most acclaimed of her generation:"e;One of the brightest, most original, and best written books that have come my way for a long time,"e; wrote Sir Henry Lucy. "e;As the mature work of an experienced author it would have been a remarkable achievement: being 'the first book of a new writer' it is an astonishing performance,' hailed the reviewer from The Daily Graphic. In this incredibly original satirical novel we are introduced to the two main characters as The Gardener and The Suffragette, and so they remain throughout. Inhabiting a huge first chapter of 302 pages and then only a tiny second one of 8 pages, these two are wildly comic and disturbingly real at one and the same time. Benson's cheekiness in commenting directly to the reader on the progress of the story, the saltiness of her slightly cynical view of the world and its ways, and the strange newness of the tale she was telling meant that, on first publication in 1915, the literary world's curiosity was most certainly piqued. Both of them are the beautifully mixed, endearingly crazy creations of Benson's unusual talent, which spins its fizzing wit on a sixpence, creating absurd comedy and wise satire out of thin air. Delivering, in its fools' progress, one of the significant debuts of its era and one of the funniest novels of the suffragette movement in one package, I Pose was hailed immediately as a classic of a new kind, establishing Stella Benson as a fresh genius of the human spirit, in all its poses.

Welcome to the colourful world of the White family. It is the early 1930s, the Great Depression, and they have fallen on hard times. Like many others, they have been 'on the road', travelling in search of work, but have now settled in the travellers' camp at Warning Hill, just outside the country town of Tiburon in central New South Wales, living in a hut of their own making. With an extraordinary cast of memorable characters, Kylie Tennant's first novel explores an Australian country town of the time with a sharp eye for what makes people tick. Whether it be a harridan pub-keeper who can't keep her bargirls in order, an obsessed policeman who concentrates so hard on the letter of law and order that he's constantly undone by simple humanity, a left-leaning parson who loves a good talk a little too much, ladies of means who can't believe it when their charity is rejected, or various shonky shop owners who'd sell their own grandmothers if only they could, no-one escapes Tennant's genially inquiring eye and wry grin. In laconic, poetic prose of great realistic warmth, Kylie Tennant draws a picture of a time when enormous hardship was the stuff of every day; laughter was a vital response to keep one's sanity. With phenomenal panache and great control of her material, she echoes Dickens in terms of the warmth, wit and understanding with which she investigates all the joys and prejudices of a country town in Australia. This brilliant novel won the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize for fiction. This edition includes an introduction by the author.

Deep in George Sand's own natal countryside of Berri in central France, Valentine de Raimbault, daughter of the chateau, and Benedict Lhery, cousin and adopted son of one of its tenant farmers, meet and fall headlong in love. Though they are very young, she 18 and he 22, both are already engaged to be married: he to his cousin, a beautiful and imperious girl who sees him as a stepping stone to comfort and security, and she to a dissolute diplomat who needs her wealth to pay his gigantic gambling debts. They must both first realize the extraordinary power of their feelings, and then enter a terrible battle with relatives, expectations and conventions, where their difference in rank proves a massive obstacle. Their union will indeed be hard won, if it can be. As they fight to understand and fulfil their love, the world bends, breaks and remakes itself around them many times. In the uncertainty, one of them unwillingly marries; the other rejects passionately the idea of a life united to any but their loved one. Lives are lost, arguments are precipitated into great conflicts, scores are settled and new ones created, intrigues are pursued, misunderstandings are promoted, long-held secrets are finally revealed. It is only when a chance mistake proves disastrously final that their tragic love finds its whole meaning, that the pattern they are creating in their lives fulfils its extraordinary design. This intensely passionate novel, the author's second, was first published in 1832.

It is a long and golden summer in the Edwardian period. London is abuzz with gentlemen in tall hats and ladies in flowing silk, some with money, and others who want it badly. Love and marriage are the great game, but the adventure is vastly varied, depending on who is playing. Creatures of wit find it their most impressive subject; creatures of love are either pinnacled or torn apart by its demands. Felicity, Sylvia and Savile Crofton, aged 25, 20 and 16 respectively, are deep in the melee. Felicity is married to Lord Chetwode, the man of her dreams, and is largely happy, but she is already feeling deeply the falling-off of contact as he pursues horseflesh and antiques across the country in ever-longer stays away. Her younger sister Sylvia is very much in the market, according to her father, who has many ideas of whom she might marry, but particularly favours a Greek millionaire, Mr Ridokanaki. He has no idea that her great love is his penniless secretary, Frank Woodville. Their brother Savile, on holiday from Eton, has not only the spirited attentions of young Dolly Clive to contend with, but also his great passion for an opera singer, whom he loves from afar. Somehow, all their problems must be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. A typically confident Savile tries to engineer a solution, but in the end it is love itself which cuts through. This mischievously witty tale of love and intrigue, the author's first, was published in 1907. Ada Leverson (nee Beddington) was born in 1862. She married Ernest Leverson at the age of 19, against her parents' consent, but the marriage was not a success. She became a contributor to several literary and artistic journals including Black and White, St Stephen's Review and, most notably, The Yellow Book in the 1890s. It was at this time, after she published a brilliantly successful sketch parody of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, that Oscar Wilde desired to meet her, and dubbed her The Sphinx. They became the greatest of friends, and she was instrumental in helping him after the disaster of his trial, when many others deserted him. Her six sparklingly witty novels were published between 1907 and 1916. She died in 1933.