The Action

Description

How far would you go to protect your sibling? Nigel Kingsley lives with his sister Martha. He loves her dearly but realises that she has been a crippling influence on his life. Hazel Saunders is Nigel's ex-lover. And she also happens to be a novelist. While Nigel may miss her, there is certainly no love lost between the two women in his life. Especially when Martha is horrified to realise that she has been used as the inspiration for a fictional character when she comes across an advance copy of Hazel's latest novel. The conflict between Martha and Hazel escalates when Martha attempts to stop the publication of the book. The Action tells the claustrophobic relationship of Nigel Kingsley and his sister, Martha, in a story which is often funny, always moving and, in the end, poignantly tragic.

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011. "One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov." Beryl Bainbridge