Mary Renault – Fire From Heaven

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Alexander the Great, Ancient Greece, Book Review, Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault

I first encountered Mary Renault’s books in my teens, as they fed a fascination I had had with Ancient Greece from a young child – not the Ancient Romans, always the Ancient Greeks!

Periodically I re-read Renault. What I most love is her ability to be deeply versed in the history, but (for the most part) to wear her history lightly and to lift these extremely complex facts (details of wars, conflicts, politics, culture) into a poetic, mythic creation of flesh and blood. Her characters seem both real living human beings, but also archetypes, dangerous, archaic, raise-the-hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck stuff.

There is something, for me, in the curious contrasted mixture of the rational, thoughtful, philosophical, conscious Apollonian strand to Greek civilisation, and the dark, Dionysian rituals, the savagery, the barbarism. Greek history and mythology is such a weird, bizarre mix

Fire From Heaven is Volume 1 of Renault’s Alexandrian Trilogy, the story of the Macedonian born Alexander the Great, from his birth, to the death of Philip of Macedon, his father (or was he – this is an important thread within the novel)

Although at times there are too many historical characters on the scene, and deciphering the many shifting alliances and wars of small states is a little confusing – particularly as there are several historical characters with the same name (3 Alexanders!) – overall this is a gripping, absorbing narrative.

Renault was of course primarily, despite her great research, a novelist, so what she has done is fleshed out and imagined the people behind the recorded facts that are there.

She is true to the spirit and the times, so that the weird, the mythic, the acceptance of the oracles, the signs, the presence of the magical is presented through the eyes of then, not interpreted as now.

Where she is most magical, for this reader, is where she rises to the poetic and symbolic. Often, in her description of the bloody, the barbaric, the destruction and savagery.

 By the clear lake of Lychnidis, the mud of combat settled, pike and eels picked clean the drifting dead. The crushed lilies slept to sprout green another year; the white acacia flowers fell like snow in the next fresh wind, and hid the blood. Widows mourned, maimed men fumbled at former skills, orphans knew hunger who had never lacked before. The people bowed to fate, as to a murrain on the cattle, or untimely hail stripping the olive trees. They went, even the widows and orphans, to make thank-offerings at the shrines;……..Their gods, regarding their offerings kindly, kept from them the knowledge that they had been a means and not an end. In grief, more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

I received this as an ARC from the digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media, who are publishing tremendous digital versions of some classic twentieth century re-releases

Fire From Heaven Amazon UK
Fire From Heaven Amazon USA

 

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Obrecht – Missa Maria Zart

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Classical music review, Missa Maria Zart, Obrecht, Tallis Scholars

Cool, spacious, mantra -like Mass

This is a remarkably `clean’ piece, acoustically, the quality of the setting, not to mention the very even quality of the singers, who hold their notes without vibrato, so that long open notes just roll out, gently rising, falling, intermingling.

The effect is rather like standing on some quiet, calm shore with the waves barely ruffled by breeze. Out beyond the edge of vision, where sea and sky meet, fading into each other, it becomes impossible to see which is which, and an empty space opens and continues. On and on.

The viewer/listener, is floated and held by this cool immensity of horizon/sound. This is singing with the quality of a mantra and The Tallis Scholars do something most magical to hold such a perfectly placed, strong and pervasive ease and poise for what is after all, a long Mass.

Unfortunately I can’t find a You Tube clip of the Tallis Scholars singing this piece, and the only You Tube version was too ‘bounced and busy’ to please me, so the clip below IS of Obrecht, and IS with the Tallis Scholars, doing beautiful things to another sacred piece. However, there is no visual! Gaze at the black rectangle, and just listen.

Obrecht: Missa Maria Zart Amazon UK
Obrecht: Missa Maria Zart Amazon USA

Leif Enger – Peace Like A River

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60s America, Book Review, Leif Enger, Peace Like A River, The Wild West

Don’t finish in a public place unless wearing dark glasses!

Set in the 1960’s, but with one of the central characters an 8/9 year old girl obsessed with ‘Wild West Heroes’ like Butch Cassidy, the ‘real world’ becomes mythic, huge and much more about the wild open spaces of the Western than about 60’s America.

Throw into the mix the central narrator, an 11 year old boy with asthma, a ‘romantic’ (to his two siblings) teenage double murderer, and a father who possesses miraculous, healing powers, and you are set for an enchanting, and heartbreaking story.

Though the family itself is the centre piece, there is a wonderful supporting cast of larger than life characters, who again, feel like they have stepped from the pages of the tail end of the 19th century.

Enger is a superlative writer and story-teller.

The ending (which I will of course not give away) is an astonishing, superlative, incandescent piece of imaginative writing, where the style perfectly catches the grandeur of its subject matter.

I finished it on a bus, taken completely unaware, and could only weep with no shades to hide behind!

I look forward to more of Leif Enger’s writing! – I read this back in 2005. It was published in 2002, and it took him 7 years to produce his second (equally delightful) book. He is clearly a writer who takes his time, whittling his prose real slow, to produce something wonderful

Peace Like a River Amazon UK
Peace Like a River Amazon USA

Kazuo Ishiguro – When We Were Orphans

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Book Review, Detective fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro, Shanghai, When We Were Orphans

A study in disengagement

Ishiguro was born in Japan and moved to the UK aged 5 – and has, for that, the intriguing ability (like Conrad) to observe ‘British’ from an outside view of within, and a precision of language (like Stoppard) that comes from English not being the earliest language or earliest imprinting. That sense of the outsider is beautifully mirrored in his central character.

This is not ‘a detective story’ in the sense that the solving of a particular crime is important, it is perhaps a detective story, by the reader, into an examination of the detective, Christopher Blake. There are of course ‘Sherlockian’ teasers, that genre is very definitely invoked, but it is far more the study of someone who has got trapped in a world of illusion – the illusion of childhood, a country that can never be returned to, nor yet can be entirely disengaged from.

I assume that it is Blake’s ability to be objective, the uninvolved observer, which makes him ‘the great detective’, but that objectivity is also his fatal flaw – the disengagement of the heart (as evidenced by his relationship to Sarah). Its not ‘the quest’ which Ishiguro is engaged with, it is ‘the quester’; his study is the outsider – and yes of course ‘Remains of the Day’ is a similar territory.

I loved the blue-grey melancholy of this book – even in the midst of ‘horrors’ happening as Shanghai turns into a battleground, there is a strange disengagement – in another book, this might have seemed a writing flaw, but here it seemed all of a piece.

When We Were Orphans Amazon UK
When We Were Orphans Amazon USA

Matthew Quick – Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

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Book Review, Forgive me Leonard Peacock, Matthew Quick, Young Adult Fiction

The agonies, and occasional ecstasies, of the sensitive young

The central character of this first person narrated book, is a young man, on his 18th birthday.

It has always seemed to me that teens are a time, curiously, of great conservative conformity – the group conformed with of course being one’s peers. It’s a time of not really being sure of who you are, and the trying on of all sorts of masks to see which ones might fit. Peer pressure at this time is intense. Pretty well everyone is mask wearing, but some seem happier with wearing the same masks as everyone else than others are

The sensitive, and those who are least comfortable with the accepted mask, whatever that is, will have a particularly hard time of it

And our narrator is one such. He has grown up with an absent, disappointing father, and a mother who is unusually self-obsessed and forgetful of her child. He is highly intelligent, thoughtful, disturbed, self-reflective, wry, mocking, sometimes unintentionally witty, and forms a few, unlikely, friendships with other rather odd people – an elderly neighbour who watches Bogie and Bacall films, a thoughtful, humanitarian teacher attempting to make his pupils think rather than be fashion-thought sheep, and a boy and a girl of his own age who, for different reasons, are also outsiders.

At times this book is almost unbearably dark and hopeless. In fact, most of the trajectory is towards violence and destruction, the gradual revealing of the sources of despair.

And yet – our narrator, fractured, damaged and suffering though he is, has this ability to connect with the other side of sensitivity and empathy – which not only brings an awareness of pain – but also of joy.

The author, Matthew Quick, on a video on Amazon’s .com site, talks about his rationale for writing the book, being to demonstrate to those on that difficult place between childhood and adulthood, that there is a little bit of hope which makes life worth pursuing, however dark that place of transition may be.

The hope in this dark and also at times darkly funny book (as our angry, pained young man is also mordant in his humour) is provided by imaginative writings, where he projects into the man he might be, and imagines the people who might be in his better life, writing letters to him, and about him, to help the boy of today be healed. His ability to imagine is not only his cross, but also his salvation.

At times within the book there are slightly strange games played with typography and arrangement. Real book readers won’t be phased by this, but initially, Kindlers might be, as till you realise this is integral and intentional, you think your ereader is about to expire! I would recommend the ‘real’ rather than the Kindle/ereader format – interesting footnotes are scattered throughout the text, and though the links work perfectly, I think books with footnotes are easier to navigate on paper.I received this as an ARC. It is marketed as children’s and Young Adult fiction – it’s the latter. I would suggest 14 and up. And definitely for adults too.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock Amazon UK
Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock Amazon USA

A.S.Byatt – The Children’s Book

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A.S.Byatt, Book Review, The Children's Book

The marriage between radicalism and Arts and Crafts – gorgeous, complex and sometimes overwhelming

This extraordinary book by A.S.Byatt is almost impossible to adequately describe, as it is incredibly layered, beautiful, subtle and the style fits the subject matter impeccably.

On the surface, Byatt traces a period of English History from 1895 to 1919, where superficial thinking looks at `before the great War – long golden Edwardian summers’ etc and contrasts this with the sudden dark horror of the Great War. In fact there was a huge amount of that `pre-war time which was also filled with horror, certainly for those who were not members of the Upper Classes, and even for some who were – for example, boys sent to Public school.

Byatt tells in part the complex and fascinating account of the rise of Fabianism, feminism, and the Arts and Crafts movement (Morris et al) who were part of that radical liberal socialist circle – at the time liberalism itself WAS radical.

She focuses on the complex lives of her imaginary characters, who inhabit the world of the arts – particularly crafts rather than fine art, theatre performance and writing.

The strange and alchemical nature of making pottery, changing what is sticky and earth, into something else, via fire, water and air is well described and mirrors the explorations of, and tensions between, the conscious rational world (politics, economics) and the unconscious world of hidden desire and myth, played out in the `Children’s Book’  fairy stories written by one of the central characters.

Conflict, whether between nations, individuals or the sexes runs through the book. The beautiful descriptions of the impossible tensions which need to be perfectly managed in the firing of pots is both real, exact, and tellingly symbolic.

A dark and bleak thread also runs through about the impossibly painful nature of love and desire, at least in a time where choice through contraception did not exist – although Marie Stopes, like other `real’  characters, moves through the book. The real characters serve as anchors and pointers.

Illusion, and whether free choice really exists is another note, examined through the exploration of performance and puppet theatre and this is both real,  and used as metaphor.

Byatt is here like some great weaver of skeins of history, twisting strands together into something that is dark, dangerous, beautiful and shining.

The Children’s Book Amazon UK
The Children’s Book Amazon USA

Diane Setterfield – Bellman & Black

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Bellman & Black, Book Review, Diane Setterfield, Literary Fiction

The challenges of comparison with your own better self

In 2006 first time author Diane Setterfield wrote a magnificent, layered, textured, playful literary mystery, which was pretty well universally praised by professional critics, loved by readers, eagerly taken up by book clubs and also sold in vast numbers.

There was then a 7 year silence from Setterfield, with eager readers wondering when, when and – of rather more import, could she possibly equal that radiant first book?

So I was delighted to be offered Setterfield’s eagerly awaited second book as an ARC.

I’m sorry to say that I read it with enjoyment for a well-crafted story, but with a heavy heart as a book by Setterfield, who had led me to expect rather more  than what I got – a perfectly good read, but ultimately not an incandescent, memorable one

In essence what she has written here, is a good old fashioned narrative about a successful entrepreneur – with a twist, or a hook, of dark psychology and a bit of the mysterious supernatural. It has been sold, or publicised as a ghost story. What it really is, I think, is a novel set in the world of nineteenth century work – but from the master, rather than the worker’s perspective – with a twist of an unusual philosophical or metaphysical kind

The writer she most reminds me of, here, is Arnold Bennett who was bedded into the Five Towns – the potteries. Reading Bennett one really understood the concerns of Victorian England, and its entrepreneurs.

William Bellman becomes involved in the woollen industry, in the Cotswolds. Setterfield is quite a physical writer, and the reader learns a lot about that workplace. Later, Bellman moves into a particular area of retail, and it’s a bit like a different version of ‘Selfridges’ – watching a driven, charismatic man create a new kind of store through his vision.

                    Floris Verster: Two dead rooks, 1926

And running through this, lest we forget, is the dark history of a childhood act of thoughtless wrong-doing, which provides the metaphysical embellishment

The book is well crafted, interesting, and no doubt had it been a first time book from a writer I would have been satisfied by an enjoyable read, a perfectly well cooked meat and two vegetables meal which fed me, left me comfortable and replete – but not a meal to remember fondly and still be talking about 7 years later as one of my most memorable and enjoyable literary repasts

It’s a good (but not a great) book from another writer – a good read, certainly. But its disappointing from Setterfield. If someone said to me ‘would you recommend this book’ – the answer would probably be ‘yes – but not if you have read The Thirteenth Tale and therefore have certain expectations’

Though the inevitable ending, and its coda, are satisfying and beautiful, I felt the journey itself bore the weight of this obvious and inevitable ending for too long. This might have worked better as a novella, or even a long short story. With a fairly small cast of individuated characters, there was not enough interest to sustain this reader, as, in effect, new incidents were repetitions of prior ones, and the same ‘lessons’ were being repeated too often

It seems hugely unfair that the ‘reward’ for raising a bar very high with a first book, is to be damned with faint praise for a second. Particularly when that second is well crafted, a good piece of work – but is not the expected, original, creative piece of brilliance.Review of an ARC from the publisher, via NetGalley

Bellman & Black Amazon UK
Bellman & Black Amazon USA

Adam Langer – The Salinger Contract

Tags

Adam Langer, Book Review, Crime Fiction, Literary pastiche, The Salinger Contract

Adam Langer – Mind Mangler

Oh boy, oh boy, The Salinger Contract is a thoroughly, obsessively, compulsively page turning read, combining the elements of crime fiction, with a blistering, surgically precise picking apart of the publishing industry, small-town academia and, even more deliciously, a tangly, knotted, play with literature itself.

The problem for any reviewer is that to unpick any of this is to spoil a potential reader’s journey. So I won’t!

Just be aware that the central character and narrator is a writer with one book to his credit, a house-husband with a writer’s block, a good marriage and a wife in academia. He has a tenuous friendship with, and admiration for, with another writer, who has been successful but is now on a downward trajectory. Both admire hugely that writer whose book was inspiration, for good and ill, to so many young men (and women) at a certain stage in their lives – Catcher In The Rye. Salinger and other writers, Mailer, Harper Lee stalk the pages.

The literature obsessed are likely to enjoy the author’s mind games with his readers the most, but even if you have never read The Catcher In The Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird or any books by any of the real writers within these pages, this is still likely to be a hugely enjoyable and entertaining read.

Real and imaginary writers stalk through these pages, and the reader will often be hard-pressed to tell the difference, and be sent scrambling for google to search which of the literary legends are the figments of Langer’s fertile imaginings

Given what is trending (Trending! Oh dear, oh dear) on best seller lists at the moment, some of the most fantastical creations seem unfortunately likely to be real. UK readers may particularly welcome (or not) something here. I’m afraid Mr Langer has left me like someone who has been told the most juicy piece of gossip they know they MUSN’T tell (a spoiler) but they really really want to tell someone. Perhaps someone could bring out an ‘I have read The Salinger Contract’ T-shirt, so that if we spot someone wearing this we could go into a huddle and exchange views, theories and best moments!

There is one particular volte-face section where I really thought he was going to lose my interest and I had an ‘oh – is this a clever too far moment – (and I’m still not sure what the answer is) – but he certainly picked up the threads again deftly. It may not, in the end, be quite as fully five star as I hoped, but, near as dammit!

I am now definitely going to visit Langer’s back catalogue.

I received this as an ARC from the publisher, – and what a teasing, tempting, satisfying literary feast it proved to be.

Clever Mr Langer – but, this is really not writing which is purely self-referential and self-congratulatory to those who recognise the allusions – I got some, am sure I missed many – there is that wonderful, page turning, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT which bites the reader hard and won’t let go. A fabulous heist!

The Salinger Contract Amazon UK
The Salinger Contract Amazon UK

Jessica Keener – Women In Bed

Tags

Book Review, Jessica Keener, Short stories, Women In Bed

9 to 5 or 5 of 9

I had a mixed reaction to Jessica Keener’s 9 short stories in this collection, partly coloured by the fact that I felt the 3 weakest stories, in my opinion, were the opening stories, with plot devices being too obvious – I particularly felt manipulated by arresting images which did not really make sense in the third one . Why would someone want to deliberately pour the contents of a bottle of pills into a drawer rather than keep them in the bottle for ease of access – other than the writer wanting to have an image of someone scrabbling in the drawer – I saw that one coming as soon as the pill pouring happened

Part of the problem with the short story genre, is that there is a tendency, once one or two stories are read, for the reader to ‘get’; the author’s tricks as well as style, and then to be able to predict exactly where the author is going to go. So I thought I had Keener’s measure, and that all stories were going to be the same

I felt the first 3 stories, which were orientated towards sexual desire, were a little superficial and predictable – and clearly, the ‘expected’ subject matter of a collection with the title Women In Bed

As this was an ARC I felt honour bound to read a little further than just 3 stories, in order to write my review, and I’m pleased I did as the fourth of the 9 stories, Woman with Birds In Her Chest, genuinely surprised and drew me in, a story about a woman taking early retirement; and the following story, Recovery, felt genuine, moving and very present.

This more surprising subject matter, and also I felt a delicacy in the layered emotions of those two stories, had me engaged and discovering rather than predicting

The story Shoreline, again disappointed me slightly as there was a clear signalling of a plot device which was going to be used to create a predictable cataclysmic scene, and moreover one which ‘in real’ the protagonist would have been unlikely to have left hanging around to precipitate events. I can’t reveal it because it will spoil the journey the reader makes in this story of a marriage going wrong.

The last 3 stories interested me again. Told in the first person, the narrator is ‘Jennie’ a name not a million miles from the author’s own – so they may or may not be semi-autobiographical, or the author may be deliberately wanting us to think so, and there is a trajectory which connects them. The titles, Bird Of Grief, Forgiveness and Heart clearly also show stages in a Heart, Life, Journey. The first and last stories in this trilogy, a journey for ‘Jennie’ with men in her life, is particularly well knitted together with the glue of a childhood, familial story, and the 3 almost form a novella.

Most of the stories end on a downward, melancholic note, although the shape of those last three, is a little different, showing themselves like 3 Acts in a play; I found the sense of self discovery and resolution across the 3 stories to be particularly well crafted.

Keenan does write well, and, for me 5 of the 9 were stories which completely succeeded.

It is probably par for the course with a short story collection, that not every story is equally strong and successful.

The ones I did like have inched it into better than Okay. I’m not jumping up and down with you HAVE to read this excitement, but think she is a writer worth reading, and watching

Received as an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley

Women In Bed Amazon UK
Women In Bed Amazon USA

The Prescient View of Science Fiction writers

Tags

Book Review, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Science fiction, SF, Soapbox

Ray Bradbury –  Fahrenheit 451

Back whenever, Science Fiction was a genre I never thought about, convinced that such writers were (sorry, this is about my previous prejudices, and may not reflect reality about the genre, then or now AT ALL) geeky guys without social skills stuck in a 7 year old comic book fantasy of space-ships, ray-guns, stun-guns, giant robotic females with mammaries the size of whoopee cushions, who happened to be coloured green or red and had just dropped in from Venus or Mars.

It took me some time to realise that some writers whom I thought of as pretty thoughtful and thought provoking – H.G.Wells, George Orwell. (I liked their politics too) John Wyndham, even Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) were also writing in this genre. Science Fiction in the hands of these writers had far less to do with ray guns (or even Ray-Bans) and had everything to do with a device for looking at our society.

Then no less an admired writer (by me) than Doris Lessing began to write the stuff in the Canopus In Argos series, and moreover began banging the SF drum, saying that some of the most exciting writing was happening in the genre, as it was a perfect medium for Society to examine itself. Big ethical and philosophical ideas of now and the future could be teased out and examined, and moreover, of course, SF was a way of looking at what both a Utopia and a Dystopia might look like – or even whether Utopia itself was in fact really achievable, or just another Dystopia.

Added to my roster of other writers to admire (and I liked their politics!) were of course Lessing herself, Ursula K Le Guin and Sheri Tepper – not to mention Margaret Atwood and even Marge Piercy in Woman On The Edge Of Time. Suddenly it seemed as if there were a whole raft of feminist writers – fine writers, feminists, turning to this genre as a way of exploring gender politics, socialism – and I realised, hey, you know what, I LIKE SF!

Anyway, this preamble has brought me to re-reading some earlier SF classics, – most recently, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Now Bradbury in this book may not be writing such well crafted complex characters as some of those writers I have mentioned, and the plot itself may even be a bit sparse or creaky, but my goodness, I am shocked and chilled and awed by how much of today’s culture he was predicting 60 years ago

Reality TV where we all become content not only to watch others living, rather than living ourselves, but, no doubt, the next step arriving very soon where our TV becomes interactive and we ourselves get inserted as bit players in the soaps we watch, or software that inserts our names into live TV, so that the TV talks directly to us, with announcers addressing us directly. Then we can live even less.

He seems to have mainlined into the fact that we have dumbed culture down, his description of the way people talk to each other so that actually they are not talking about anything at all seems unnervingly like the “and then he said, he was like, it was, you know, like, it was, yeah, no, know what I mean?” babble.  You hear these conversations all around, more and more being said without any meaning:

 People don’t talk about anything’…’They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else

He predicts also the worst excesses of PC speak, and puts his finger neatly on the button of our expectation of happiness as a right, our inability to come to terms with the fact that pain and suffering are a real part of embodiment, of living in a world of matter. The best, the justest, the fairest society will not be able to end our personal suffering

 Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these

I was shaking my head in amazement at the accurate identification of our can’t be still, can’t reflect society which settles for circuses (never mind the bread) and drinks, drugs, medicates, and buys its way out of having to acknowledge that pain is an unavoidable part of life itself – we will grow old (if we are that lucky); we will have to manage the loss, at some point, of those we love, and we too will die.

There is more – a society which cannot deal with complexity, with the fact there may not always be an obvious right and an obvious wrong, and this too, we cannot bear. One of the great challenges are situations where whatever action is taken, it will not be without some great cost, and yet we have to take some action, as the not taking an action is of course itself an act. Events in Syria are so much illustrative of this. I am minded of W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst
Are full of Passionate intensity

How do we live having let go of  the comfortable and childish security of a world which is black OR white, and let ourselves inhabit that more confusing  challenging world filled with ever more subtle complexities of paradoxes, conflicts and oppositions coexisting together into and and, rather than either or?

 If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

And, seeing ahead to the vapid game show, where factual knowledge gives us the illusion we have intelligence and wisdom

 Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving

He talks also about our inability to bear silence – everyone cushioned from the world by their own blare of noise wall to wall music piped into our heads, children plonked in front of the pabulum TV, learning early to be passive not interactive, – even the fashion for elective caesarians on non-medical grounds.

What makes this book so powerful still is the fact that so much of its dystopian vision is the way our lives actually are; not in fact so much ‘science fiction’ after all, rather a sociological analysis

We don’t need giant invaders from other galaxies with super powerful rare weapons to destroy us, and our world. We are ourselves those violent, aggressive, alien invaders

Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK
Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK