Nicholas Shakespeare

Nicholas Shakespeare's collected stories take us across oceans and continents into the intimate lives of his characters and the dilemmas and temptations they face. The opening novella, 'Oddfellows', tells the little-known history of horrifying events that occurred on 1 January 1915 in the Australian outback town of Broken Hill, where, on the citizens' annual picnic outing, the only enemy attack to occur on Australian soil during the First World War, took them by surprise. The other stories range through India, Africa, Argentina and Canada, and include a magnificent tale of civic folly which sees an unreliable young councillor from the Bolivian mining town of Oruro lose himself in the seductions of Paris while trying to commission a bronze statue of his local hero. All of them showcase Shakespeare's talent for insight and drama, and his fascination with connection and disconnection and cultural misunderstanding.

"A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and, during his brief excursion behind the Iron Curtain, falls for an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. Her situation touches him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends the next 19 years pretending to himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will he find her? All he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave her - Snowleg." "Nicholas Shakespeare's novel is a powerful love story that explores the close, fraught relationship between England and Germany, between a man who grows up believing himself to be a chivalrous English public schoolboy and a woman who tries to live loyally under a repressive regime. In her world not only is every move recorded, but a person's scent may be secretly bottled, labelled and stored away until such time as she needs to be traced."--Jacket.

The story of a police detective who searches for an anarchist in an unnamed Latin American country, and has an extra-marital affair with his daughter's mysterious ballet teacher.

"Bruce Chatwin burst onto the literary landscape in 1977 with In Patagonia, which quickly became one of the most influential travel books of the twentieth century. The books that followed - The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz - confirmed his status as a major writer able to reinvent himself constantly. And the life he led successfully established him as one of the most charismatic and elusive literary figures of our time.". "Beautiful to behold, charming, intelligent, a writer of exquisite prose, Chatwin was welcome in every society - from the most glamorous patrons of Sotheby's, where he held his first job, to the remote tribes of Africa. He was a thinker of striking originality, a reader of astonishing breadth and depth, and a mesmerizing storyteller.". "And yet for all the adoration he received, when Chatwin died of AIDS in 1989, he died an enigma, a panoply of apparently conflicting identities. Married for twenty-three years to his American wife, Elizabeth, he was also an active homosexual. A socialite who loved to regale his rich and famous friends with uproariously funny stories about his travels and the people he met on them, he was at heart a single-minded loner who explored the limits of extreme solitude.". "Nicholas Shakespeare spent eight years traveling across five continents in Chatwin's footsteps. He was given unrestricted access to Chatwin's private notebooks, diaries, and letters, and has gathered evidence from Chatwin's peers, his friends, his family, his hosts, his enemies, and his lovers. The result is this biography, that leads us into Chatwin's world - across all the vast geographic, social, and emotional expanses that he traveled - and into his psyche."--BOOK JACKET.

Laura Fairchild enters a charmed world when eccentric patriarch Owen Salinger takes her in as his protege and confidante. In the patrician circles of Boston's Beacon Hill, she acquires grace, culture - and a passionate lover in Owen's nephew, Paul. But Owen's death shatters her dreams. Favored in his will, she now faces the wrath of his family, who close ranks against her. Disinherited, Laura vows to recapture all that has been ruthlessly taken away. With brilliance and flair she builds a hotel empire. Yet beneath her successful facade lives the outcast girl, longing for the home and family she has lost. as long-buried secrets rise like threatening clouds, Laura has to fight to regain her love, her family, and to claim her true inheritance!

The High Flyer narrates the story of a City lawyer, Carter Graham, who "has it all". Her outwardly successful life, complete with highly compensated career and suitable marriage, undergoes profound changes after harrowing events smacking of the occult begin to occur, which reveal that things are not what they seem.

On 1 January 1915, ramifications from the First World War, raging half a world away, were felt in Broken Hill, Australia, when in a guerrilla-style military operation, four citizens were killed and seven wounded. It was the annual picnic day in Broken Hill and a thousand citizens were dressed for fun when the only enemy attack to take place on Australian soil during World War I, took them by surprise. Nicholas Shakespeare has taken this little known piece of Australian history and turned it into a story for our time.

Autobiographical novel by the son of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West.