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|  | | Living With the Truth
An old bookseller gets to spend two days with the personification of truth.
p style="text-align: justify;">Picture, for a moment, Jonathan Payne, probably the last person in the world you would expect to be the lead character in anybody's novel, a faded old bookseller nearing the end of a wasted life. We meet him alone in his flat in a seaside town in the north of England just waiting on Death to knock at his front door.br />
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But life has something else in store for poor Jonathan. Instead of Death he gets to spend an infuriating two days with the personification of truth who opens Jonathan's eyes to not only what his life has become but what it migh | |  | | Making Sense
This is a collection of thematically-interlinked short stories.
How do you make sense out of life? Some say that it doesn't and you shouldn't bother. Instead most of us try to impose a sense of sense on it. We dream up reasons, justifications or excuses to give our lives meaning. In this collection of short stories we meet twenty people who have nothing in common apart this need to make sense out of their lives. We have a murderer, a gambler, an adoptee, a stand-up comic, a teacher; we have men, women, parents and children, all doing their best to answer the self-same questions and where their five senses fall short they have to rely on their other sens | |  | | Milligan and Murphy
On one level this is simply a humorous tale reminiscent of the work of Flann O’Brien about two Irish layabouts who end up running away from home almost by accident and who encounter a number of eccentric characters on their way to see the sea; on another it’s a metafiction about the relationship between an author and his characters; it might just be a silly book like Puckoon or it might be all three.
div>There are no reasons for unreasonable things. So the protagonists of this novel are told having found themselves setting out on an adventure that they really didn't plan. Like many people, Murdoch has always had a great affection for the two lead characters in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Have you ever wondered what Didi and Gogo were like when they were young and what led them to end up waiting for a man who would most likely never turn up? That's basically the premise Murdoch set out to explore in Milligan and Murphy but that was not the question he finally answered. /div>
div>& | |  | | Stranger than Fiction
The sequel to Living with the Truth. There are always more truths to be revealed.
div style="text-align: justify;">font face="verdana, arial, sans-serif">span style="line-height: 18px;">The whole book takes place in a landscape generated by Jonathan's memories of his past life. Everyone and everything is as he remembers it, not necessarily the way it was. In this pseudo-reality he has to face his mother and father, his past (presented as a film) and a conference made up of various Jonathans from alternative realities. Oh, and he gets to visit Truth's home plane, where he gets to meet some of the other Powers who have had a hand in messing up life as he knew it. /sp | |  | | This Is Not About What You Think
A collection of poems spanning over thirty years arranged in such a way that they present a kind of seven ages of man. But what man?
div>I have been writing poetry for some 35 years. A long time. A lot of poetry. /div>
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div>In all that time I've never published even a chapbook. The reason? It sounds perverse but I could never find enough poems that I felt went together. I made endless lists but I always gave up thinking that if I just hung on for a bit that there would be enough. One can only keep that up for so long and so now — finally — I've managed to arrange some 80 poems into a sequence that pleases me. /div>
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div>After all these years the solution was o |
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