Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Jonathan Coe – The Rain Before it Falls

Gill’s aunt, Rosamund, dies at the age of 73. She never had children, so after the funeral, Gill goes to her house to clear it. Among her things, Gill finds four tapes accompanied by a note saying: “Gill – these are for Imogen. If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself.

Advertisements in newspapers, magazines, internet searches and a talk with the National Institute for the Blind are all to no avail. When Gill’s search comes to a dead end, she decides to listen to the tapes. As the tape plays in the recorder, Imogen’s surprise grows by the minute. Rosamund selected twenty pictures from family albums. With the help of these pictures, the reader is told the story of Rosamund, Imogen and her mother and grandmother.

Rosamund describes the pictures in detail for Imogen, who’s blind. A picket fence, a driveway, a patch of green, a tree. In between these details, she weaves the secret history of her family an that of Imogen. A tragic, bittersweet history, which could only be told after the death of its narrator. The ending is as shocking as it is moving.

“The Best English Novelist of his Generation” – Nick Hornby
“The book is a moving exploration of the inheritance of unhappiness.” – The Daily Mail

Ian McEwan – On Chesil Beach

“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. In the next room, visible through the open door, was a four-poster bed, rather narrow, whose bedcover was pure white and stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand.”

The year is 1962. Florence, the daughter of a successful businessman and an aloof Oxford academic, is a talented violinist. She dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, the earnest young history student she met by chance and who unexpectedly wooed her and won her heart. Edward grew up in the country on the outskirts of Oxford where his father, the headmaster of the local school, struggled to keep the household together and his mother, brain-damaged from an accident, drifted in a world of her own. Edward’s native intelligence, coupled with a longing to experience the excitement and intellectual fervour of the city, had taken him to University College in London. Falling in love with the accomplished, shy and sensitive Florence – and having his affections returned with equal intensity – has utterly changed his life.
Their marriage, they believe, will bring them happiness, the confidence and the freedom to fulfill their true destinies. The glowing promise of the future, however, cannot totally mask their worries about the wedding night. Edward, who has had little experience with women, frets about his sexual prowess. Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by conflicting emotions and a fear of the moment she will surrender herself.
From the precise and intimate depiction of two young lovers eager to rise above the hurts and confusion of the past, to the touching story of how their unexpressed misunderstandings and fears shape the rest of their lives, On Chesil Beach is an extraordinary novel that brilliantly, movingly shows us how the entire course of a life can be changed – by a gesture not made or a word not spoken. (Random House)

“McEwan’s brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible significance.” The Observer

“A fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowered to devastating effect.” Independent on Sunday

(trailer of “On Chesil Beach. Out of the Book”.A short film directed by Doug Biro)

Nick Hornby – Slam

Just when everything is coming together for Sam, his girlfriend Alicia drops a bombshell. Make that ex-girlfriend-because by the time she tells him she’s pregnant, they’ve already called it quits. Sam does not want to be a teenage dad. His mom had him at sixteen and has made it very clear how having a baby so young interrupted her life. There’s only one person Sam can turn to-his hero, skating legend Tony Hawk. Sam believes the answers to life’s hurdles can be found in Hawk’s autobiography.
But even Tony Hawk isn’t offering answers this time-or is he? Inexplicably, Sam finds himself whizzed into the future, for a quick glimpse of what will be…or what could be. In this wonderfully witty, poignant story about a teenage boy unexpectedly thrust into fatherhood, it’s up to Sam to make the right decisions so the bad things that could happen, well, don’t. (Puffin Books)

(Slam, Penguin Books)