Naomi Mitchison

86p. : 19cm

Naomi Mitchison, daughter of a distinguished scientist, sister of geneticist J B S Haldane, was always interested in the sciences, especially genetics. Her novels did not tend to demonstrate this, and she did not publish a Science Fiction novel until almost forty years into her fiction-writing career. This novel works effectively for readers who usually eschew the genre and prefer more traditional narratives. Explorers like Mary are an elite class who consider curiosity to be Terrans' supreme gift, and in the novel she more than once takes risks that may destroy her life. Her voice, as she records her adventures and experiments, is individual, attractive and memorable.

Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, Snake starts with a premise as frightening and common-place as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. Snake is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.

Nine stories about boys and girls living between the 4th century B.C. to the 11th century A.D., "in a kind of frame-work of history, showing what happened between each story and also where they happened.... There are Greeks, Romans and barbarians, sometimes early Britons, Byzantines, inheritors of both Greece and Romne, and finally some English of the time of the Norman conquest." -- Jacket flap.

Set over two thousand years ago on the clam and fertile shores of the Black Sea, The Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic.

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