A Partisan's Daughter - Hardcover

De Bernieres, Louis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307396916 ISBN 13: 9780307396914

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2008

Synopsis

Set in North London during the Winter of Discontent, A Partisan’s Daughter features the relationship between Chris, an unhappily married, middle-aged Englishman and Roza, a young Serbian woman who has recently moved to London.

While driving through Archway in the course of his job as a medical rep, Chris is captivated by a young woman on a street corner. Clumsily, he engages her in conversation, and he secures an invitation to return one day for a coffee.

His visits become more frequent and Roza starts to tell him the story of her life, drawing him increasingly into her world – from her childhood as a daughter of one of Tito’s Partisans through her journey to England and on to her more recent colourful and dangerous past in London.

A Partisan’s Daughter is about the power of storytelling. It is also a beautifully wrought and unlikely love story which is both compelling and moving to read. Here is another wonderful novel from the author of the bestselling Birds Without Wings and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

About this title

From the Back Cover

The new audiobook from the acclaimed author of Birds Without Wings and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a love story at once raw and sweetly funny, wry and heartbreakingly sad.

Chris is bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. In his forties, he’s a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a hooker into his car.

Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to London, the daughter of one of Tito’s partisans. She’s in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she’s not a hooker, when she’s propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway.

Over the next few months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. She’s a fast-talking Scheherazade, saving her own life by telling it to Chris. And he takes in her tales as if they were oxygen in an otherwise airless world. But is Roza telling the truth? Does Chris hear the stories through the filter of his own need? Does it even matter?

The deeply moving story of their unlikely love – narrated in the moment and through recollection, each of their voices deftly realized – is also a brilliantly subtle commentary on storytelling: its seductions and powers, and its ultimately unavoidable dangers.

About the Author

Louis de Bernières is the bestselling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book in 1995. His most recent novel is Birds Without Wings.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0307396916
• ISBN 13: 9780307396914
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224