Eva Figes - Böcker

This is a captivating exploration of the relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter. Alive to the special sweetness of the relationship, Figes also explores the darker side of childhood. How in fairy tales such as "Snow White", "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Hansel and Gretel" difficult emotions like jealousy and anger, fear of death and abandonment are evoked and transformed by the storyteller's art. It is at this point that the author evokes the fairy tale of her own privileged Berlin childhood which was brutally shattered when her family escaped from the Nazis to England, leaving behind the much loved grandparents, who perished in a Polish camp. But a new child around allows the grandmother the chance we all seek to sneak back into the garden of innocence.

In acclaimed author Eva Figes' inventive reshaping of the pop psychological thriller, her fifth novel opens as Nelly Dean, a middle-aged woman suffering from amnesia, checks into a small-town hotel with a suitcase full of cash and no idea where it - or she - came from. Distrustful of everyone from the waiter who serves her lunch to a store clerk who claims to know her from grade school, Nelly fears she is part of a conspiracy, although she is strangely indifferent to the clues that might explain her puzzling circumstances. Part dark comedy, part mystery novel, Nelly's Version offers an unsettling journey into the mind of a witty, intelligent woman stuck in a pastless present.

"I have never read a text which goes even half as far as this one in expressing the particular poignancy which lay at the heart of the impressionist movement. I say this as an art critic. As a novelist I would simply like to pay my tribute to the mastery of language, portraiture and storytelling which Figes has now at her command." - John Berger"A small masterpiece" - Susan Hill "A luminous prose poem" - Joyce Carol OatesThis shimmering novel is an extraordinary portrait of a day in the life of an artist at work and at home. In prose as luminous as the colours Monet is using to portray his garden, Eva Figes guides us from dawn (‘midnight blueblack growing grey and misty’) through midday (‘the sun was high now… shrinking what little shadow remained, fading colours, the pink rambler roses on the fence by the railway track looked almost white’) to evening (‘the tide of shadows rising as the sunset glow faded outside.’) Monet’s wife, grieving for a lost daughter; a living daughter, fretting that she will not be able to marry the man she loves; their friend the abbé, eating and drinking with them; two children playing, closest to Monet in the freshness and certainty of their vision; all experiencing in different ways the richness of the light that Monet works unceasingly to pin down in his last, great paintings.