John Brown's Body by Al Barker

John Brown's Body by Al Barker

Marise Tomelty is a child-wife who dislikes sex and is terrified of open spaces. Ralph Shilling lives in the flat above the Tomelty's and is a dealer in pesticides. Marise's commercial traveller husband casually mentions that he recognizes Ralph as John Brown, acquitted for lack of evidence of an atrocious double murder. Nevertheless, Marise encourages Ralph's attentions, in need of the exciting combination of passion and fear. A serious exploration of the nature of our experience of ourselves and each other, of the tug between body and soull, life and death, truth and fantasy, this is an extraordinary novel written in the precise ,impeccable prose for which A L Barker is so famed.

It would be hard to find anyone who chooses words more exactly or constructs with more precision PENELOPE FITZGERALD She writes with a precision and an economy of words which had me gasping with admiration AUBERON WAUGH At her best she is formidable, and from a bare corner of human relations gathers a rich harvest ADAM MARS-JONES

A.L. Barker left school at sixteen and after the war was employed by the BBC. Her first short story collection, INNOCENTS, won the first ever Somerset Maugham Award in 1947. The author of eleven novels and ten collections of stories, she died in 2002.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781860497209
ISBN 10	1860497209
Title	John Brown's Body
Author	A L Barker
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Little, Brown Book Group
Year published	1999-09-02
Number of pages	224
Prizes	Short-listed for Booker Prize for Fiction 1969
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable