Human Voices

Description

New cover re-issue The human voices of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel are those of the BBC in the first years of the Second World War, the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and in the BBC -- as elsewhere -- some had to fail and some had to die. It does not pretend to be an accurate history of Broadcasting House in those years, but 'one is left with the sensation,' as William Boyd said, reviewing it in the London Magazine, 'that this is what it was really like.'

Penelope Fitzgerald was the author of nine novels, three of which - The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels - were shortlisted for the Booker. She won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. A superb biographer and critic, she was also the author of lives of the artist Burne-Jones, the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers, a study of her remarkable family. She died in 2000.

'Of all the novelists of the last quarter-century, she has the most unarguable claim on greatness. [It has been] a career we, as readers, can only count ourselves lucky to have lived through.' Philip Hensher, Spectator 'One of the pleasures of reading Penelope Fitzgerald is the unpredictability of her intelligence, which never loses its quality, but springs constant surprises, and if you make the mistake of reading her fast because she is so readable, you will miss some of the best jokes. This is a very funny novel.' The Times 'Comic, and sometimes extraordinarily sad.' A.S. Byatt, TLS