Secrets of the Sea
Page 41
—Colin Thubron, The Sunday Times (UK)
“Though it runs to five hundred fifty pages, Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography feels concise: comprehensively researched, elegantly written, perfectly balanced between the life, the books, and the ideas. It’s hard to imagine the Life being better done—or that…there is anything now left to say.”
—Blake Morrison, The Independent on Sunday
“I take my scalp off to Nicholas Shakespeare. Biographies don’t come any better than this…. A glorious quilt-work of texts, voices, and places, joined together with consummate judgement.”
—Justin Wintle, Financial Times
“An epic piece of work of immense fascination. In awe-inspiring detail…[Shakespeare] does what Chatwin never did and drenches all these worlds in their emotional, human implications.”
—Duncan Fallowell, The Times (UK)
“This excellent biography is very far removed from Chatwin’s own anecdotal concision. However, it is fantastically difficult to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of someone’s life. Shakespeare has managed to pull it off.”
—Ian Thomson, The Guardian
“Vastly enjoyable.”
—The Independent
“Thoroughly researched and unsparingly revealing…. A graphic page-turner.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Masterful, absorbing…simply a brilliant portrait of the artist as a young man.”
—Booklist
“An ingenious, outsize, myth-meets-facts ‘life and works’ of the charismatic global citizen and compulsive tale-teller…. This spirited tell-all will make newcomers yearn to try his books. An unflinching reconstruction of a singular writer’s scorching trajectory through life: Speed makes it concise; fate makes it haunting.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Quite simply one of the most beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and cleverly constructed biographies written this decade. Shakespeare has a quite extraordinary empathy for his subject, whom he portrays with humor, warmth, and an eye for telling detail, creating a book almost as original, intelligent, and observant as those by Chatwin himself.”
—William Dalrymple, Literary Review
PRAISE FOR
Snowleg
“Superb…. Beautifully written, rich in character, it displays all the courage for which its hero so desperately wants to be recognized.”
—The Economist
“Superbly evoked…. A morality tale which keeps the reader spellbound till the last sentence.”
—Literary Review
“This novel is one of the finest attempts in English to convey something of two very strange places which no longer appear on the map of Europe…Shakespeare has told a very skillful story.”
—The Evening Standard
“Haunting…. Compelling…. Shakespeare deftly captures both the paranoia and the material and cultural poverty of East Germany.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A brooding, introspective, deftly crafted novel…. A moving story that speaks volumes about an era and a political system that is rapidly slipping into the recesses of our memory.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Like Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient and Shirley Hazzard in The Great Fire, Shakespeare weds a formal, detached prose style to a deeply romantic theme; the result is a powerful, ethereal love story set against the twisted politics of East Germany under Communism…. A beautifully written, utterly compelling story of love and politics.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A volatile cocktail of passion and politics.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A richly imagined tale of thwarted romance between characters whose lives have been warped by East German treachery under Communism.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Elegant, romantic, forceful.”
—Library Journal
“Already my bet for this year’s Booker Prize. A superbly achieved and moving novel.”
—Giles Foden
PRAISE FOR
In Tasmania
“Meticulous, lyrical history of the island…. Shakespeare’s writing is transcendent—readers will gain a deep understanding not only of Tasmania’s history, but of the forces that have shaped its isolated peoples’ nature…. His skill as a storyteller never wavers.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A beautiful affectionate portrait.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
PRAISE FOR
The Vision of Elena Silves
“Written with precision, clarity, and rare beauty…. Alongside Salman Rushdie and the late Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare now joins the ranks of the New Exotics school.”
—New Statesman
“A remarkable debut…. A story of love and insurrection brilliantly told…. One of the best books about the continent written by an outsider.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“A novel of action in the best tradition of Conrad and Greene…. Love, violence, revolution, and death—a denouement that is unexpected, shocking, and brilliantly conceived…. I closed the novel with both satisfaction and regret.”
—Literary Review
PRAISE FOR
The High Flyer
“Wonderful…. He tells a story like an angel.”
—The Observer
“Shakespeare’s lyricism is all his own, and he raises his lovers to a plateau of passion where Greene never ventured.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“A deeply satisfying book. I feel quite exceptionally inclined to read it all over again.”
—Rosemary Stoyle, Literary Review
Also by Nicholas Shakespeare
Fiction
The Vision of Elena Silves
The High Flyer
The Dancer Upstairs
Snowleg
Nonfiction
Bruce Chatwin
In Tasmania
Credits
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph by Jana Leon/JupiterImages
Copyright
SECRETS OF THE SEA. Copyright © 2007 by Nicholas Shakespeare. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2008 ISBN: 9780061881923
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