The Silken Net

Description

Half-French with an agile, inquiring mind, Rosemary Lewis cannot help being out of the ordinary in Thurston, the Cumbrian market town where she grows up between the wars. An early, bruising failure in love drives her inwards to the solace of books until she meets Edgar - vigorous, down to earth and determined to win her. Charting their life together, this powerful novel probes with exceptional acuity the heights and tortured depths of a bond that becomes a shackle.

Melvyn Bragg's first novel, For Want of a Nail, was published in 1965 and since then his novels have included The Hired Man, for which he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, Without a City Wall, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Credo, The Maid of Buttermere, The Soldier's Return, which was published to huge critical acclaim in 1999 and won the WHSmith Literary Award, and the equally acclaimed A Son of War. He has also written several works of non-fiction including Speak for England, an oral history of the twentieth century, Rich, a biography of Richard Burton and On Giants' Shoulders, a history of science based on his BBC radio series. He is controller of Arts at LWT and President of the National Campaign for the Arts, and in 1998 he was made a life peer.

A strong and solid novel, with a totally convincing figure, at once fallible and admirable, at its centre - Sunday Telegraph Distinguished by passages of prose which have precisely the sort of leaping life that Lawrence held up before himself as an ideal all through his career ... Melvyn Bragg has already a considerable body of work behind him. THE SILKEN NET is his best book yet - Guardian Most attractive of all is this book's open-heartedness, its serious intention and a certain ingenuousness in the way it treats its themes - The Sunday Times Melvyn Bragg writes with a timelessness that suits his heroine and his theme, that is in tune with the whole story - Financial Times Words could be used linking Melvyn Bragg with Hardy, Lawrence and Bennett in the Grand Chain: that he belongs there is indisputable - New Statesman