Last of the Pleasure Gardens

Description

A child is born . . . Even when it comes late in life, after the rest of the family has grown up and gone away, you cannot fail to feel a flush of pleasure and hope. But when the child shows little inclination to speak and seems unable to grasp the rudiments of walking, when your fears slowly and horribly mount, the awful truth must be faced and hope crashes to tragedy and pain. So with Barbara and Peter and their late-born son Tim. This is the brilliant story of the agony that enters their settled life: the obsessiveness, the dangerous selfless love, the heart-wrenching contradictions, and the violence - both mental and physical.

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

'I don't think Mr King has written a better book than this.' David Holloway, Daily Telegraph 'Impressively right in tone, manner and attitude.' Isabel Quigly, Sunday Telegraph