LITMIR.BIZ

Poet John Carson lives in a crumbling seaside house with his sister and niece. He writes feverishly to the woman who has abandoned him as a lover, yet kept him as a correspondent. Theresa: beautiful, generous . . . and married. The occasional fleeting encounter between the lovers fuels John the writer, but leaves John the man close to despair. To keep his feelings in check, John loses himself in the details of his home life – the never-ending chores of domesticity, his niece’s mysterious eating disorder and the menu he is attempting to write in rhyming couplets save him from himself, most of the time. There is also the eccentric old woman who lives in their garden cottage and the poetry journal that he has just been appointed to edit. Will John and Theresa find a way to overcome everything that holds them apart or is, in fact, a state of permanent longing really what poets need?

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The coastal settlement of Slangkop, near Cape Town, comes alive over weekends when mercurial Chas Fawkes holds court at Midden House. Invited to one of his legendary parties, shy, plump librarian Nina Browne is smitten and becomes first his secretary, then his lover. But things are not as they seem on the glittering surface, as Nina in turn is loved and watched over by Chas’s childhood playmate, the hermit-like environmentalist William. When Chas’s estranged alcoholic wife Dolly briefly returns, she steals William’s savings and leaves behind a different treasure – her baby son, Oro. In a gentler, more innocent way than Chas, young Oro is a catalyst in the Slangkop community. William is forced out of his seclusion and proves a surprisingly good stand-in dad. William is still desperate to win Nina’s heart, but how, when she is so caught up in Chas’s slipstream? As the inhabitants of this eccentric seaside community orbit around Chas and his increasingly desperate crises, sex raises questions that love must help them answer.

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Margot is a late-night talk radio host – the perfect job for an outspoken insomniac. Her Kalk Bay home is crowded with wonderfully evocative characters such as her teenage daughter, Pia, her hopelessly romantic yet mostly absent lover Curtis, and the family hanger-on, Mr Morland, a professional psychic. Finally there’s her mother, Zoe, once the acclaimed author of a quirky self-help volume with the same title, but now increasingly senile. In this deeply moving new novel by the award-winning poet and novelist, Finuala Dowling, the author examines the fleeting and often so complicated moments of happiness in any household. A must-have for all bookshelves.

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Notes from the Dementia Ward is Finuala Dowling’s third collection of verse following on the brilliant and popular I Flying and Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe. This new collection deals in part with the tragic-comic effects of the inexorable and distressing collapse into senility and the way in which memory and yearning come to the fore as a mix of poignancy and wit. The balance between the grim and the touchingly comic is delicately maintained and the subject is imbued with dignity and grace. The dementia poems are interlaced with wry, ironic and compassionate poems that are the hallmark of this remarkable poet.

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