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Craven House
- Author
- Patrick Hamilton
- Narrator
- Charles Armstrong
- Publisher
- Little, Brown Book Group
- Publish Date
- 6 July 2017
- Run Time
- 9 hours 6 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Patrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.
In Craven House, among the shifting, uncertain world of the English boarding house, with its sad population of the shabby genteel on the way down - and the eternal optimists who would never get up or on - the young Patrick Hamilton, with loving, horrified fascination, first mapped out the territory that he would make, uniquely, his own.
Although many of Hamilton's lifelong interests are here, they are handled with a youthful brio and optimism conspicuously absent from his later work. The inmates of Craven House have their foibles, but most are indulgently treated by an author whose world view has yet to harden from scepticism into cynicism.
The generational conflicts of Hamilton's own youth thread throughout the narrative, with hair bobbing and dancing as the battle lines. That perennial of the 1920s bourgeoisie, the 'servant problem', is never far from the surface, and tensions crescendo gradually to a resolution one climactic dinnertime.
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Details
- Author
- Patrick Hamilton
- Narrator
- Charles Armstrong
- Duration
- 9 hours 6 minutes
- Release Date
- 6 July 2017
- ISBN
- 9781405537780
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Little, Brown Book Group
- Genre
- Classic fiction: general and literary, Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary
Synopsis
'All his novels are terrific' Sarah WatersPatrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.In Craven House, among the shifting, uncertain world of the English boarding house, with its sad population of the shabby genteel on the way down - and the eternal optimists who would never get up or on - the young Patrick Hamilton, with loving, horrified fascination, first mapped out the territory that he would make, uniquely, his own. Although many of Hamilton's lifelong interests are here, they are handled with a youthful brio and optimism conspicuously absent from his later work. The inmates of Craven House have their foibles, but most are indulgently treated by an author whose world view has yet to harden from scepticism into cynicism. The generational conflicts of Hamilton's own youth thread throughout the narrative, with hair bobbing and dancing as the battle lines. That perennial of the 1920s bourgeoisie, the 'servant problem', is never far from the surface, and tensions crescendo gradually to a resolution one climactic dinnertime.
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