The Nice and the Good

Description

Iris Murdoch really knows how to write, can tell a story, delineate a character, catch an atmosphere with deadly accuracy John Betjeman A revolver shot rings through a Whitehall office one hot afternoon in the middle of an English summer. A Government official has apparently shot himself, but the circumstances are questionable - prompting Octavian Gray, head of the department in which the dead man worked, to investigate. Lawyer John Ducane is charged with the task, interviewing other civil servants by day, and by night attempting repeatedly - and unsuccessfully - to break up with his mistress. When Ducane travels to Gray's Dorset home everything becomes even more mysterious and nothing is quite as it seems.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. She read Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, and after working in the Treasury and abroad, was awarded a research studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1948 she returned to Oxford as fellow and tutor at St Anne's College and later taught at the Royal College of Art. Until her death in 1999, she lived in Oxford with her husband, the academic and critic, John Bayley. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 and in the 1997 PEN Awards received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature. Iris Murdoch made her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net. Her twenty-six novels include the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978), the James Tait Black Memorial prize-winning The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread prize-winning The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her philosophy includes Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992); other philosophical writings, including The Sovereignty of Good (1970), are collected in Existentialists and Mystics (1997).

Iris Murdoch is incapable of writing without fascinating and beautiful colour * The Times * Iris Murdoch was one of the best and most influential writers of the twentieth century * Guardian * Irish Murdoch's most versitile novel, and chief among them is the pleasure which the authors take in her characters * Country Life * Just as Jane Austen defines moral categories like "sense" and "sensibility" in her novels, so Iris Murdoch creates new constellations of meaning around those stand-bys of ordinary language, the nice and the good * Atlantic *