Prodigies

Description

Three women-daughter, mother and aunt-abandon their pampered, privileged lives in The Hague of the 1860s, to set off on an epic journey to the heart of Africa. Since the daughter, Alexine, has inherited a vast fortune from her mysterious tycoon father, the women take with them the family butler and nurse and each her own personal maid. In Cairo they recruit a staff of more than a hundred. The male explorers of the day at first mock at so audacious a trespass into what has previously been an almost exclusively male preserve. Then they begin to accord the trio a grudging admiration for their initiative, courage and endurance. Had she been born into a different class, the mother might have made a successful career as a concert pianist. The aunt, unmarried, once had an unhappy love-affair with Tsar Alexander II. The travellers go through a series of now exhilarating, now bizarre and now terrifying adventures, as indomitably they push on with what becomes an exploration not merely of uncharted Africa but of their own innermost selves. Eventually tragedy engulfs each of them in turn. In this richly inventive novel, Francis King deployed all his formidable skills as a storyteller in bringing to vivid life both these three real-life characters and the extraordinary diversity of imagined people-European adventurers, Arab slave-traders, Egyptian porters, African tribesmen-met on their odyssey.

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

'It is a rare pleasure to know from the first page of a new novel that you are in for a treat. Francis King immediately grabs the reader's attention with an apparently effortless mastery' Louise Guinness, Evening Standard