Change Here For Babylon

Description

When Tom Harrington embarks on an affair with the beautiful and affectionate Emily Hunter, he has no idea how seriously his life will be affected. At first, it is a straightforward deception, requiring only the usual expected tasks of lying to their respective spouses and hiding their relationship from the public eye. Before a year is out, however, Tom and Emily's love has somehow become the epicenter of a quickly unraveling web of treachery, jealousy, intrigue, and even murder. As the facts become muddied and the casualties pile up, Tom tries to make sense of it all: his own responsibility and guilt; his mistress's secrets and her husband's slick exterior; his wife's desperation and confusion. But the more control he tries to take, the less he finds he has, and the situation spirals ever quicker. Change Here for Babylon is a gripping story of misplaced emotion and misguided action. It grabs the reader from the very start, racing along with the suspense of a brilliant crime novel and moving with grim inevitability towards its surprising conclusion.

Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children - Carrie's War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry - have become contemporary classics. She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured - but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages. Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter's Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime's contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970. Bawden passed away on Wednesday 22 August 2012, at her home in North London with her family around her.