To the City

Description

Joe Beech, a London publisher, is in his fifties. Strong and healthy, married for twenty-five years with two grown children, with many friends and attractive to women, his life would seem good - yet he is haunted by a sense of pain and foreboding. A family skiing holiday in Austria with friends seems to promise respite, yet under the brightness of the snow, the physical exhilaration, the shared jokes and memories from other holidays, something dark still seems to be working. Whom or what are threatened? His children? His son's beautiful girlfriend? His marriage? An old friend? Himself? In the six days in the mountains which, physically and temporally, form the book's compass, Joe finds himself travelling far back in his mind to re-visit the past: as a young child in 1939 he was despatched from this same country to the safety of England by his Jewish parents, never to return except as a stranger. For him, Vienna, his birthplace, has become loaded with the significance of a city known only from dreams, and the prospect of spending some days there after the holiday - and secretly meeting a woman-friend there - fills him with both excitement and dread. In what sense will this be the journey's end? What, finally, is waiting there for him? Gillian Tindall has always been interested in the way in which people are governed by past events, by their own perception of those events and by their complex relationships with places. To The City is one of her finest and most subtly constructed novel to date. `Remarkable for its penetration into another world, another life.' Spectator `Tindall's novel is powerful, intricate, skilled and moving.' Publishing News `Desperately true to life . . . wholly convincing, full of thought, feeling and wisdom.' Sunday Times

Gillian Tindall began her career as a prize-winning novelist. She has continued to publish fiction but has also staked out an impressive territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place. Her The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village which first appeared thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print; nor has Celestine: Voices from a French Village, published in the mid 1990s and translated into several languages, for which she was decorated by the French government. Well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of her research, Gillian is a master of miniaturist history. She lives with her husband in London.