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| Sunday, 09 March 2003 |
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Feeling dull? Nothing like a quiet read on a Sunday. Well here is a selection of some groovy, grizzly, adventurous, murderous, heartbreaking and melodramatic, stories and short stories from Warnasuriya book shop, D.R.Wijewardena Mawatha, Colombo 10, for you to try out. 1."It's a Sunny Day on the Moon" and other stories-by Jeanne Thwaites "My Uncle Cyril was caught by the Japanese and put in a prison camp during World War II. Every morning he stood in line and a guard read out numbers. The number of the man who stood on Uncle Cyril's left was called one morning and the next day the man on his right was called. They were taken away and he never saw them again. Later the British found a big ship the Japanese had captured. It was floating in the pacific. In the hold were the bodies of hundreds of prisoners of war, including my uncle's two friends. The hold had been sealed and they had starved to death or died from loss of air. Some had their arms around each other. Uncle Cyril was captured on Christmas Day. He never could stand listening to Christmas carols when he came home. I was the only person he told his war pains to. It was because I was a child and could listen without crying". (Uncle Cyril's War) 2."Separation"-by Dan Franck An international literary sensation, and translated into eleven languages, "Separation" is an elegant, heartbreaking account of the break-up of a man's marriage and his battle for custody of his two sons. Offering a bittersweet commentary on marriage and morals in the 90s, it is also the story of one man's obsession-with his wife, the life they lead, and with the children they raise together. And it is the story of his passionate desire, and near crippling inability, to prevent any of it from slipping away. Ironically, it is also deeply romantic, and one of the most luminous portrayals of women in recent fiction. Separation speaks to an entire generation of people looking over their shoulders and attempting to determine, each in his or her own fashion, what went wrong with their lives-and why. They discover, as the narrator does himself, that sometimes, a final, irrevocable rupture is precisely what it takes, to do the one thing they never learned to do before: grow up. 3."The Last of the Mohicans"-by James Fenimore Cooper Skirmishes, captures, flights and rescues are only some of the ingredients of this classic tale of bloody conflict between the British and the French in the forests of North America. It also tells of the cynical exploitations of the native tribes by the two protagonists, setting Indian, Mohican against Huron. However, there is one honourable European, Natty Bumppo, the loyal and courageous woodsman, who prefers the simple code of natural law to the machinations of the white man. Together with Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, he helps thwart the efforts of Magua, the sinister Huron, who tries to prevent Alice and Cora Munro from joining their father, the British commander of Fort William Henry. 4."Death comes as the End"-by Agatha Christie It is Egypt in 2000 BC, where death gives meaning to life. At the foot of a cliff lies the broken, twisted body of Nofret, concubine to a Ka-priest. Young, beautiful and venomous, most agree that she deserved to die like a snake. Yet Renisenb, the priest's daughter, believes that the woman's death was not fate, but murder. Increasingly, she becomes convinced that the source of evil lurks within her own father's household. 5."The Night Listener"-By Armistead Maupin Gabriel Noone is a writer whose late-night radio stories have brought him into the homes of millions. Noone is in the midst of a painful separation from his lover of ten years, when a publisher sends him the memoir of a thirteen-year-old boy who suffered horrific abuse at the hands of his parents. Pete Lomax is not only a brave and gifted diarist but a devoted listener to Noone's show. When Noone phones the boy to offer encouragement, it soon becomes clear that Pete sees in this heartsick, middle-aged storyteller the loving father he's always wanted. Thus begins an extraordinary friendship that only grows deeper as the boy's health deteriorates, freeing Noone ton unlock his innermost feelings. Then, out of the blue, troubling new questions arise, exploding Noone's comfortable assumptions and causing his ordered existence to spin wildly out of control. As he walks the tightrope between truth and illusion, he is finally forced to confront all his relationships-familial, romantic and erotic. 6."The Shape of Snakes"-by Minette Walters November 1978. The winter of discontent. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets-and somewhere in West London a black woman dies in a rain-soaked gutter. She was known as "Mad Annie" and was despised by her neighbours. Her passing would have gone unmourned and unnoticed but for the young woman who finds her and who believes-apparently against reason-that Annie was murdered. But whatever the truth about Annie-whether she was as mad as her neighbours claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said, whether she cruelly mistreated the cats found starving in her house-something passed between her and Mrs.Ranelagh in the moment of death which binds this one woman to her cause for the next twenty years. But why is Mrs.Ranelgh so convinced it was murder, when by her own account Annie died without speaking? Why does the subject make her husband so angry that he refuses to talk about what happened that night? And why would any woman spend twenty painstaking years uncovering the truth-unless her reasons are personal...? |
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