Fairness: A Novel - Hardcover

Mount, Ferdinand

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786708506 ISBN 13: 9780786708505

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2001

Synopsis

This ingenious and inventive novel from the award-winning author of Jem (and Sam) at once comprises an autobiography of Aldous (Gus) Cotton, an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual learning difficulties, and an erratic history of modern England. It is also and more so the story of Helen Hardress, the serious, slim, blond young woman who quickens Gus’s pulse when they first meet in Normandy one summer in the early 1960s as she will, off and on, for the next twenty years. For no one’s life is quite the same once Helen Hardress has passed through it. Least of all, that of the long-pining Gus. “Reading Ferdinand Mount is as much fun as pink gin.”—Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review “Fairness is funny, touching, picaresque, decked out with eccentric characters, improbable, artful and, rarest of all, unfailingly entertaining.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World “A quick, witty read with resonance.”—Baltimore Sun

About this title

About the Author

Ferdinand Mount's earlier novel, Of Love and Asthma, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. Umbrella, the first of his Tales of History and Imagination, was described by the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson as 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'. He is also well known as a political columnist.

From Library Journal

Gus and Helen meet when both are serving as nannies to British summer people in Normandy. He's recovering from both asthma and asthma camp, she is tiny and fascinating. Both are followed through a wide sweep of the second half of the 20th century, beginning with Gus's sad affair with lonely Jane, mom to one of their charges. The characters occasionally mingle in various times and places, including Africa, and the natures of all involved are revealed in episodic, often witty ways. Overall, however, the author of Jem (And Sam) has produced a quirky novel that is only intermittently engaging and that often wanders in a vague, unsatisfying way. For larger fiction collections where British literature is popular. Ann Fisher, Radford P.L., VA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0786708506
• ISBN 13: 9780786708505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320