D. M. Thomas

D. M. Thomas paints a deeply affecting portrait of the intricate relationship between Solzhenitsyn's life and his art, always framing this biography in the context of the historical times. Indeed, Thomas tells not only the harrowing and sorrowful tale of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's life but also the painful story of Russia itself, a country perpetually at war with itself and its own diverse people. Beginning with the years of Revolution and Civil War, Solzhenitsyn's dramatic life embodies the cruelty, passion, and chaos that have characterized Russian history over the last century. Thomas's account covers extensively all the major periods of the Russian author's remarkable life, from childhood to his years in the Stalinist labor camps, his battle against censorship and his expulsion from the U.S.S.R. in 1974, and his Vermont period and return to a Russia that has shed its Communist cloak but not its dark interior.

Simon is not a particularly successful novelist. Truth be told, he is decidedly second rate. And so it seems absolutely appropriate that he is invited to the Greek Isle of Skagathos to teach overly enthusiastic would-be writers who have about as much chance of publishing a book as Simon has of winning the Booker Prize. The summer colony, of which the writers are a part, has taken the tenets of the new age to heart, whether in pursuit of the ever-elusive orgasm or finding the magic key that will unlock their inner creativity. And Simon, as polite as he is randy, cannot quite bring himself to explain to his students that there is no necessary connection between the price of one's computer and the quality of one's writing.

From the celebrated author of The White Hotel comes D.M. Thomas's new novel Eating Pavlova, a fascinating foray into the most influential mind of the twentieth century. It is 1939. The man who lives in London waiting to die, protected from the worst pain of cancer by regular injections of morphine, has had an almost incalculable effect (some would say for the worst) upon modern times. His last dreams, the last hauntings of family ghosts, will draw keen speculations for decades to come. At his side, a no longer young woman devotedly tends him. She has molded her life and identity upon his. She has imitated him - even his erotic attachments. She is Anna: Mother-Anna; Daughter-Anna; Anna Pavlova; Anna-Psyche; Anna Freud. With great craft and intelligence, D.M. Thomas plunges into this man's conscious and unconscious world. He rifles with Anna through her father's diaries where damning secrets lurk. Has Freud planted lies to unnerve Anna or protect himself? Is this what he termed "exploring fiction" or is it one of his elaborate jokes? This conundrum makes Eating Pavlova a powerful, provocative, and delicious reading experience.

The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is the haunting subject of D.M. Thomas's Flying in to Love. Reconstructing the events that took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Thomas's novel brings back to life the tragedy that left its indelible mark on American history and embroiders it with the author's own lyrical imagination. A literary novel of enormous power, interweaving fact and fiction, it is decidedly his best book since The White Hotel. Thomas paints vivid portraits of the President, Mrs. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and Texas Governor John Connally. He brilliantly explores the continuing obsessions both with Kennedy the man and with the disturbing paradoxes and mysteries of his death. Reality, fantasy. and mythology interlink like the triple underpass in Dealey Plaza. Flying in to Love is D.M. Thomas's most controversial novel yet and a book destined to shock readers and create a sensation.

A darkly comic, erotic novel which was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. Bored by a writers' conference in a London hotel, the narrator and three Soviet friends improvise stories that will make a novel. Like Russian dolls, the episodes they create unfold, each with another inside it.

Discusses what it means to ingest things humans weren't meant to eat, and how the line between human bodies and foreign bodies can sometimes blur.

"Freud mène l'enquête" (M. Braudeau). Un superbe roman, le troisième de Thomas, nourri de références psychanalytiques et culturelles. A l'origine de l'oeuvre, un cas d'hystérie : celui d'une chanteuse d'opéra juive, russo-polonaise, Anna G. Et l'un des rares "échecs" subis par Freud dans sa vie professionnelle d'analyste, même s'il affirma à sa patiente qu'elle était "guérie, de tout, sauf de la vie". Thèmes principaux : le symbolisme de l'inconscient, l'érotisme et l'Holocauste (le massacre de Babi Yar).

Vienna in the early 20th century was, in the words of our protagonist and narrator, a soulless, syphilitic whore of a city; a turbulent and bubbling melting pot of races, creeds and politics, rapidly expanding as it strained to contain the ever-increasing multitudes. In such places the nightmare moments of modern history are conceived. This novel is a fictionalised account of those who were to change the very collective psyche of mankind. It is a vivid and poignant portrayal of the sometimes thin dividing line between becoming good or evil. D.M. Thomas is a British novelist and poet, born and living in Cornwall. His novel The White Hotel was an international bestseller and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is rightly considered a modern classic, translated into more than 30 languages. John Updike said of the book: ‘Astonishing … A forthright sensuality mixed with a fine historical feeling for the nightmare moments in modern history, a dreamlike fluidity and quickness’; the statement could equally be applied to Hunters in the Snow.

John Trenear, an 84 year old widower, lives alone in a bleak London tower block. He has turned away from a world he finds alien, its customs and beliefs so different from the Christian simplicities of his Cornish childhood. He tweets not, neither does he watch TV. Consequently, when the coronavirus strikes and lockdown is imposed, he has no idea what is happening; Corona to him means only the fizzy soft drink he enjoyed as a child. On VE Day there are no Corona bottles being opened with an explosion of fizz, as they had in the merry street party he remembers: indeed the streets below his flat are incomprehensibly empty. But the day brings him added confusion and distress, for it appears that something called a ‘hate crime’ has been committed. Corona Man, a study of old age, confusion and isolation, is both very poignant and very funny.