Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2965 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

The Guardian
`It's a wise and moving novel, perfectly accomplished.'

Tatler
'The author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin gives us and bittersweet love story set in Seventies London'

Daily Telegraph
'De Bernieres is a skilful writer, poetic but unforced'

Customer Reviews

diappointing
I have always loved Loius de Berniers` books, as witty, human, original, serious and funny at the same time, in short wonderful to read. But, alas, at last he seems to have reached what one politely calls midlife crisis and all his imagination seems to have slipped down to where this crisis normally takes place. We have to listen - just as the male character of the book - to endless gory and rather boring tales of Roza`s, a yugoslav former prostitute's, mostly sexual adventures, while the fortiish (not really so old) Chris gets more and more aroused and horny about her. The two like each other and love each other a bit, but the man, Chris, is so repressed that nothing happens except at the end where he gets stone drunk and spoils it all. One cannot really sympathize with either character.
Please, wonderful Louis de Berniers, keep writing your great stories and don't get into the cliché trap of middle aged men's single mindedness.

Definetly worth a read...
I think the way the story is written is done very well and the book is worth reading. Gets you hooked near the end and a sign of a good book is when you get an emmotional attachment and this is what it does. You get into the characters and can picture the scenes vivdly. short review i know but you get the jist, just buy it !

Who said hackneyed claptrap cruising on his famous name? ...
... because whoever it was, you had it right on the money. Louis de Berniers is a fabulously gifted writer, but he just wasn't trying for this dreadful effort.

No story or plot in itself, one would hope for a richness of character, but there is none, just a couple of one dimensional stereotypes and a load of wikipedia factoids about Tito's Yugoslavia and sleazy soho nightclubs. The scene setting - harking back to the bad old days of seventies Britian by linking in to news stories of the day - is terribly corny.

It gets one star simply because Amazon won't let me give it less. Come on Louis, I know the editors get on your back for output, but this crap really is devaluing your other excellent work by association.