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DOUBLE FAULT (1997) by Lionel Shriver

A cautionary tale of passion and rivalry. Double fault is also a love story set in the high pressure world of professional tennis. With the unerring scrutiny that is her trademark. Shriver examines a modern marriage – not a pretty sight.

“her exploration of her characters is so fearless that although readers may not sympathise with her, they’ll understand why she is driven to destroy what she loves” metro

Synopsis

'Love me, love my game', says twenty-three year-old Willy Novinsky. Ever since she picked up a racquet at the age of four, tennis has been Willy's one love, until the day she meets Eric Oberdorf. She's a middle-ranked professional tennis player and he's a Princeton graduate who took up playing tennis at the age of eighteen. Low-ranked but untested, Eric, too, aims to make his mark on the international tennis circuit. Willy beholds compatibility spiced with friendly rivalry, and discovers her first passion outside a tennis court. They marry. Married life starts well, but animated shop talk and blissful love-making soon give way to full-tilt competition over who can rise to the top first. Driven and gifted, Willy maintains the lead until she severs her knee ligaments in a devastating spill. As Willy recuperates, her ranking plummets whilst her husband's climbs, until he is eventually playing in the US Open. Anguished at falling short of her lifelong dream and resentful of her husband's success, Willy slides irresistibly toward the first quiet tragedy of her young life.

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

"'An awesomely smart, stylish and pitiless achievement' Independent '

Taps into unspoken fears of maternal ambivalence that are not easily acknowledged and do not fit neatly into glossy magazine notions of female empowerment' Guardian Unlimited

'Harrowing, tense and thought-provoking, this is a vocal challenge to every accepted parenting manual you've ever read' Daily Mail '

An elegant psychological and philosophical investigation of culpability with a brilliant denouement' Observer"

Embers (1942) BY Sándor Márai (1900-1989)

Embers is the story of two very old men, both formed by a world that had long disappeared by the time he wrote it. The General and his long-absent and estranged old army friend are products of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so marvellously chronicled by Joseph Roth, Robert Musil and others. Márai was six years younger then Roth. His view was decidedly retrospective and elegiac. It was less the losing of a world, more its loss that concerned him. The two old men of the story live by a fiercely held code of honour that determines the complex relationship between them and the woman they had both loved when young, the General’s by now long-dead wife Kristina, who did not speak a word to her husband in the last eight years of her life and love of whom had broken up their friendship.

Márai was intensely interested in psychology, in the unwrapping of human fears, desires and motives. He also had a dramatist’s instinct for the timing of confessions and revelations. Above all he had the poet’s feeling for language and imagery, the way word pictures build expectations, strip them down and open up the hidden corridors of consciousness. When the young wife-to-be tells the Emperor Franz-Joseph of her impending marriage to the then young Hungarian Officer of the Guards the emperor smiles and tells her to beware: “ In the forest where he is taking you there are bears. He is a bear too.” By the beginning of the book the old bear is alone in his hunting lodge with only his ninety-one year old wet-nurse from childhood as his companion.

Then, suddenly, the old friend announces his return. Everything must be perfect. There are so many questions the General wants to ask. What happened on that July day in 1899 when they went hunting together? What had been the relationship between his much awaited guest and his wife? Small but vital items of evidence are tucked away in the house. The guest arrives half way through the book and the curious conversation begins. ©George Szirtes