School for Love (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Manning, Olivia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590173031 ISBN 13: 9781590173039

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2009

Synopsis

Jerusalem in 1945 is a city in flux: refugees from the war in Europe fill its streets and cafés, the British colonial mandate is coming to an end, and tensions are on the rise between the Arab and Jewish populations. Felix Latimer, a recently orphaned teenager, arrives in Jerusalem from Baghdad, biding time until he can secure passage to England. Adrift and deeply lonely, Felix has no choice but to room in a boardinghouse run by Miss Bohun, a relative he has never met. Miss Bohun is a holy terror, a cheerless miser who proclaims the ideals of a fundamentalist group known as the Ever-Readies—joy, charity, and love—even as she makes life a misery for her boarders. Then Mrs. Ellis, a fascinating young widow, moves into the house and disrupts its dreary routine for good.
Olivia Manning’s great subject is the lives of ordinary people caught up in history. Here, as in her panoramic depiction of World War II, The Balkan Trilogy, she offers a rich and psychologically nuanced story of life on the precipice, and she tells it with equal parts compassion, skepticism, and humor.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Orphaned, friendless and bewildered, young Felix Latimer comes to war-time Jerusalem to lodge with Miss Bohun, one
of the most redoubtable (and ridiculous) of comic horrors in English fiction.

From the Back Cover:

“Distinctly out of the ordinary...School for Love shows remarkable qualities of force and originality.” – TLS

“This is a remarkable book.” – C.P. Snow

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1590173031
• ISBN 13: 9781590173039
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232