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Nick Hornby | Zadie Smith The young British writer Zadie Smith took readers and the literary establishment by surprise with her first novel, White Teeth (2000), portraying the private hopes and fears of Londoners, native and immigrant. The high level of excitement stirred by White Teeth, whose action begins in 1970s Britain, was partly a result of its appeal to a wide range of readers, regardless of age, gender, or politics. Two of the main characters in the sprawling novel are middle-aged men--Samad, a Bengali Muslim, and Archie, a white Englishman--navigating their wartime memories and their marriages to much younger women. The men find themselves bewildered by, and unable to conform to, late-20th-century conventions. Smith's works in the GCPL collection | Ian McEwan
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| A.S. Byatt Byatt's first novel, Shadow of a Sun, was published in 1964, but it was not until the publication of her fifth work of fiction, Possession, in 1990, that she achieved widespread recognition. A detective story laced with mystery and romance, Possession landed on the New York Times bestseller list and captured the 1990 Booker Prize, the most prestigious British literary award. In discussing her work for Contemporary Authors (1991), Byatt said: "I admire--am excited by--intellectual curiosity of any kind: scientific, linguistic, psychological, and also by literature as a complicated, huge, interrelating pattern. I also like recording small observed facts and feelings. I see writing and thinking as a passionate activity, like any other." Byatt's works in the GCPL collection | Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time is already being hailed as a literary classic to rank with the greats. Mark Haddon is 40, stocky and boyish, in his sloppy blue jumper, green cords, Caterpillar boots and shocking pink socks. The main character in his widely popular novel is Christopher Boone, who suffers (though the book never actually tells you) from a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome. A mathematical genius, and a whiz at physics and cosmology, Christopher lives in a world of facts and logic, in which people are scary and threatening because they tell jokes he can't understand, they use figurative language that makes no sense, and they're always trying to touch or embrace him. He is by some distance the oddest and most original narrator to appear in years ... Source: The Independent Online Edition January 2004 Haddon's works in the GCPL collection | Penelope Fitzgerald "I try to work within closed areas, where moral and emotional problems will be intensified. I go back to times when prohibitions and social pressures were stronger so as to concentrate on difficulties which I profoundly believe have not gone away. I like to bring in children, because they introduce a different scale of judgment, probably based on the one we taught them but which we never intended to be taken literally. I feel drawn to people whom the twentieth century considers expendable, but who don't give up. As far as I'm concerned, they are not failures, for no one who shows courage can be considered a failure. I've heard my novels described as 'light,' but I mean them very seriously." ...A latecomer to the literary scene, almost sixty when her first book was published, Penelope Fitzgerald more than compensated for lost time with novels and literary biographies that have secured her place in her family's distinguished tradition. Fitzgerald passed away in 2000. Her last novel was The Means of Escape. Fitzgerald's works in the GCPL collection | ||||
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| J. K. Rowling Joanne Kathleen Rowling entered the world in 1965 in Chipping Sodbury General Hospital in Bristol, England, a fitting beginning for someone who would later enjoy making up strange names for people, places, and games played on flying broomsticks. Her younger sister Di was born just under two years later. Rowling remembers that she always wanted to write and that the first story she actually wrote down, when she was five or six, was a story about a rabbit called Rabbit. Many of her favorite memories center around reading--hearing The Wind in the Willows read aloud by her father when she had the measles, enjoying the fantastic adventure stories of E. Nesbit, reveling in the magical world of C. S. Lewis's Narnia, and reading and rereading her favorite story of all, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. She is of course widely known as the creator Harry Potter. Rowling's works in the GCPL collection | Kingsley Amis Obituary from Current Biography Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company - AMIS, KINGSLEY Apr. 16, 1922-Oct. 22, 1995. British man of letters; novelist; short-story writer; poet; anthologist of poetry; essayist; literary critic; as novelist, is generally regarded as a moral satirist in the tradition of Angus Wilson and Evelyn Waugh; has also been compared, in varying ways and degrees, to Henry Fielding, Samuel Butler, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and P. G. Wodehouse; with publication of his first novel (also the first of the several of his books that were made into films), Lucky Jim (1954), a comic satire on social and academic pretensions, was widely identified, over his objections, with so-called Angry Young Men of that era. Amis' works in the GCPL collection | Penelope Lively Lively's original intention was to write social history, but as a mother who read, she has said, "inordinately" to her children, she came to feel that her particular interests might be better explored in books for children. Her central preoccupation is the relationship between past and present, and these works, with their element of fantasy, allowed her to delve into how memories are constructed and distorted... As she said in an interview in Horn Book, adult characters are able to consider the past "in the context of a lifetime rather than in the context of history." This personal sense of the past, she believes, constantly interacts with and alters the present, the individual's perceptions of life, of self, and of others. Significantly, the first book she wrote for adults, a work of nonfiction, was a study of landscape history entitled The Presence of the Past. Lively's most recent novel is The Photograph. Lively's works in the GCPL collection | ||||
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John Le Carre | Helen Fielding 1948- British writer "Women these days are trying so hard to get everything right," the British writer Helen Fielding observed to Alexandra Jacobs for Entertainment Weekly (June 12, 1998). "You're supposed to do so much. Have a career, a man. Look nice, smell good. Do yoga, go to the gym, get your hair done, get nice clothes, cook nice meals. There are just these ideas of what you're supposed to be, and you just can't do it all. It's not fair. That's how Bridget sprung from me, from that idea of trying to be so perfect." The "Bridget" to whom Fielding referred is the title character of her novel Bridget Jones's Diary , and the sequel, Bridget Jones, The Edge of Reason. Fielding's works in the GCPL collection | V.S. Naipaul V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered to be one of the finest living writers in the English language. A native of Trinidad with Indian ancestry and a citizen of Great Britain through long residence there, Naipaul has all his life been an exile by both temperament and circumstance. His writing on England brought this response from the Nobel committee: "In his masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul visits the reality of England like an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle. With apparently short-sighted and random observations he creates an unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighbourhoods." - www. nobelprize.org In 1990 Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He lives in London, England. His most recent book is Magic Seeds. Naipaul's works in the GCPL collection | ||||