Punishments

Description

Michael, an attractive young medical student, is eager for experience as he travels to the German University town where he and his English friends will stay in the homes of local undergraduates with whom they will debate, attend lectures and seminars, picnic and swim in the hot summer of 1948. He is prepared for the desolate landscape, even for the hunger of the people. His own memories of the bombing of London and Coventry; Hitler; the concentration camps are still close at hand. But does the cheerful friendliness of their welcome mask any antagonism? How do the Germans cope with their guilt - if they feel any guilt? How do they suppress their memories of horror? Are the British too crass and patronizing? As Michael struggles to understand what is going on beneath the surface - and to understand why he is at once attracted to and repelled by the good-looking Jurgen - he comes to realize these few weeks are an experience which will mark him for life. Francis King, whose 'writing is always accomplished and elegant', (A. S. Byatt) displays those qualities with characteristic aplomb in this subtle, intelligent novel of distinction.

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

'One of his tautest plots ... alive with period detail and vividly exhuming an era, King's reconstruction of Germany demoralized and bankrupted by military defeat frequently calls to mind Christopher Isherwood's depictions of the country after the First World War.' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'So good and so disturbing ... reading Francis King closely, as he deserves, is both rewarding and punishing: he forces you to perform your own acts of darkness ... marvellously described.' Victoria Glendinning, The Times