What Was Promised
Author(s): Tobias Hill
London in the aftermath of war: children run wild on East End bombsites, while their elders strive for better lives in a country beggared by victory. Clarence and Bernadette Malcolm have come five thousand miles in search of prosperity, but find the Mother Country not at all as has been promised them; Solly and Dora Lazarus, too, are strangers in a strange land, struggling to belong even as they try to make sense of their past; and Michael and Mary Lockhart take with both hands all that the world owes them, wherever it leads them, whatever the cost. In the street markets and tenements of Bethnal Green the three families live and work together in uneasy harmony, until Michael shatters the balance between them, his hunger for betterment changing the courses of all their lives over decades and generations. Reaching across forty years and capturing a city and a people in a time of tumultuous change, What Was Promised is a breathtaking novel by a master storyteller.
Product Information
Three decades. Three families. One city. What Was Promised is a beautiful, powerful, multi-layered novel of London and its children, of roots and belonging, and of the collisions that can pull us together and spin us apart
What Was Promised vibrates with the polyphonic sounds of London in the aftermath of the war, carrying the reader through the hopes and needs of ensuing generations. Hill writes with magnificent poise, seducing us through the prism of lives in the book with his buoyant, mischievous prose Nikita Lalwani Beginning after the Second World War and ending 40 years on, this is a portrait of London and its citizens: grubby, thieving, vibrant, drawn from many continents and rendered poetic by Hill's prose Vogue
Tobias Hill was born in London. In 2003 the TLS nominated him as one the best young writers in Britain. In 2004 he was selected as one of the country's Next Generation poets and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His collection of stories, Skin, won the Pen-Macmillan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. What Was Promised is his fifth novel. www.tobiashill.com
General Fields
- :
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : 0.595
- : 01 March 2014
- : 234mm X 153mm
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 April 2014
- : books
Special Fields
- : Tobias Hill
- : Paperback
- : Export/Airside ed
- : 384