A Whole Life is in fact just that: a compressed chronicle of one man’s entire life, from birth (nearly) to death. Photo credit: Steve McCurry.Apparently, if we are to believe the venerable Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Robert Seethaler’s slim latest work, A Whole Life, is “a novel for sadists.” Such a proclamation seems an extreme one for a book whose diminutive size and unpretentious premise fairly trumpet harmlessness. The spectre of racism and the history slavery is never far away, but more often than not Theroux is met with the warmest of welcomes and a willingness to engage in deep and wide-ranging conversations. On four road trips across four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits small-town churches and gun shows, meets mayors and social workers, writers and reverends. He finds in the deep south a place of contradiction, full of unforgettable characters, landscapes, music, and sense of community, but also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates.
Presenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed American author Paul Theroux about his bestselling travel book Deep South.Īfter fifty years crossing the globe, seeking adventure and stories to tell about places far from home, Theroux travels deep into the heart of his native country and discovers a land as profoundly foreign as anything he has previously experienced abroad.
Other novels about boarding schools mentioned in this programme include Make your Home among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James and Black Ice by Lorene Cary. She forms intense friendships with other girls complicated relationships with teachers and an all-consuming infatuation with a boy from the cool crowd, all of which leads to conflicts with her parents back home in the mid-West, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, she becomes a shrewd observer of, and ultimately a participant in, their snobby culture and rituals.
Set in an exclusive boarding school in north-eastern America, Prep is an insightful, caustic and funny coming-of-age story and a savage dissection of class, race, and gender.Ĭlever, aspirational Lee Fiora is fourteen years old when her father drops her at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts that she has won a scholarship to. Best-selling American author Curtis Sittenfeld discusses her acclaimed debut novel, Prep.
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