a_week_in_december.pptx
- Количество слайдов: 18
sebastian Faulks A Week in December
‘I had a very happy childhood, ’ said Faulks. ‘My parents were kind, humorous and affectionate. My brother Edward was a great companion. Edward and I were both obsessed by ball games, and in the summer we played cricket for about eight hours a days. ’
Faulks’s mother introduced her sons to books at a young age. «My father was into books only, I think, not music so much – he liked Trollope, Waugh, Graham Greene. My mother knew all of Dickens backwards. Those characters were real people to her. »
Both brothers were educated at Elstree School near Reading. Faulks went as top scholar to Wellington College in 1966 and in 1970 won an open exhibition to read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1974, and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2007.
‘From the age of about fourteen, I had made up my mind. I was inspired by Dickens and D. H. Lawrence among others. I set my heart on being a novelist at that young age. ’
David Hughes became a lifelong friend.
In 1979 Faulks joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph as the junior reporter on the diary column. Faulks worked as a feature writer for the Sunday Telegraph from 1983 to 1986. He wrote a monthly column for the Guardian, then for two years a weekly one in the Evening Standard and had a short spell as film reviewer for the Mail On Sunday.
In 1989, he married Veronica Youlten, formerly his assistant on the Independent books pages. They have three children: William (born 1990), Holly (born 1992) and Arthur (born 1996).
They spent a year in south west France, near Agen, in 1995 -96, while Faulks was writing Charlotte Gray, but have lived in London since then.
A week in December
Plot: The book begins with the elaborate seating plan of a dinner party. It ends once that dinner party has taken place. Sophie, the wife of a newly elected Member of Parliament, must decide whom to place where. Several of the protagonists are present at the dinner, and the storylines are, to a large extent, tied up as a result of what occurs there. In the course of the book the reader is introduced to John Veals, a hedge fund trader who is arguably the most important character. He is a ruthless businessman, whose immense fortune seems to have become meaningless. He is more interested in the chase, the challenge of acquiring more and more capital. As he embarks on one of the riskiest deals of his life, his family is about to be torn apart. But does he even care?
Novels: The Literary Review has said that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time. Faulks' 2005 novel Human Traces, was described by Trevor Nunn as "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century. "
Faulks is best known for his three novels set in early twentieth-century France. The first, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, was published in 1989. This was followed by Birdsong (1993), and Charlotte Gray (1998). The latter two were best-sellers, and Charlotte Gray was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
In 2007, Faulks published Engleby. The Daily Telegraph said the book was "distinguished by a remarkable intellectual energy: a narrative verve, technical mastery of the possibilities of the novel form and vivid sense of the tragic contingency of human life. "
a_week_in_december.pptx