The Travellers - Softcover

Swinfen, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0992822823 ISBN 13: 9780992822828

Publisher: Shakenoak Press, 2014

Synopsis

Sofia Niklai, a reclusive exile, and Kate Milburn, locked in a stifling marriage, form a tentative friendship on a windswept beach in Northumbria. While Sofia forces herself to confront her father's diaries, Kate must face half-remembered shadows from her childhood. Together they make an impulsive journey to Hungary, Sofia's homeland. It is a journey from which neither can return unaltered. Their meeting in Hungary with Istvan Rudnay, also marked by the dark experiences of his youth, leads them to a discovery of the warmth and love so lacking in their own lives, whilst he in turn comes to a reconciliation with the past and hope for the future. Sharply observed and recounted with tenderness and wisdom, The Travellers delineates the intense joys and sorrows of individual lives upon a broad canvas of recent European history.

About this title

Review:

`I very much admired the pace of the story, the changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions - things lost and found, and meetings and partings . . . I enjoyed it very much, and thought it was even more successful than The Anniversary in keeping the reader's interest and sympathy to the very last page.' -- PENELOPE FITZGERALD

`Pity, remorse and embarrassment are common reactions in sensitive Western Europeans who visit the countries which used to be cut off by the Iron Curtain. How lucky we were in comparison to the deprived and oppressed people who emerged into a kind of freedom so few years ago. What a weight of terrible history bears down on those who live in the lands of concentration camps and communism. Did we deserve our good fortune, or must we take responsibility for failing to rescue Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? Ann Swinfen has used all these complicated emotions in a novel with parallel strands of place (Hungary and provincial England) and of periods (wartime, revolution and the present-day)...I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel, especially the informative Hungarian sections...a novel of character...[and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained.' -- JESSICA MANN, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

`An original and compelling novel from the author of the highly praised The Anniversary.' -- PUBLISHING NEWS

`I read and enjoyed Ann Swinfen's first novel, The Anniversary, and was delighted when this new one [The Travellers] arrived. And I wasn't disappointed, for here is another absorbing, deftly interwoven story which keeps the reader intrigued and interested from beginning to end...Swinfen is a skilled writer, creating living, breathing characters that leap off the page. A highly satisfying read.'
--SANDRA DYSON, HULL DAILY MAIL

About the Author:

THE AUTHOR Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She read Classics and Mathematics at Oxford, where she married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for an MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public. Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. Her fourth novel, The Testament of Mariam, marked something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her latest novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators. Currently she is working on a series set in late sixteenth century London, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez. She now lives on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband (formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee), a cocker spaniel and two Maine Coon cats.

About this edition

• Publisher: Shakenoak Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0992822823
• ISBN 13: 9780992822828
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300