The Rescue Man - Rilegato

Quinn, Anthony

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0224087274 ISBN 13: 9780224087278

Casa editrice: Jonathan Cape, 2009

Riassunto

Rescue Man opens on the eve of the Second World War.With uncertainty in the air as the world seems on the brink of disaster, Liverpool is a city tense in anticipation of the coming conflict.Tom Baines is struggling to finish a book chronicling the architecture of his beloved Liverpool.Orphaned as a child and now approaching forty with no prospect of a family of his own, Baines is a man emotionally adrift.Unable to commit to anything, either personal or professional, he is left looking in at life from the outside. Then old university tutor passes on information about the diary of a Victorian architect and sends Baines to a photographer who will help him with his book.Both introductions will change Baines’s life.The diary is that of Peter Eames, Victorian visionary and self-proclaimed genius.The photographers are Richard and Bella Tanqueray – a couple with whom Baines forms an immediate bond. The outbreak of war brings a new sense of purpose and unexpected relationships.Baines joins the Rescue Men –retrieving the wounded from bombed buildings.The Blitz is a relentless bombardment trailing devastation and loss in its wake.Yet in wartime ordinary rules are suspended, risks taken and Baines finds himself caught up in a love affair that is as heady and all-consuming as it is transgressive. With writing that is both immediate and deeply steeped in its time, Anthony Quinn recreates wartime Liverpool with the same emotional intensity and fidelity with which he renders the city of Eames’s Victorian diaries.Quinn is a writer whose facility for language will carry you through the streets of ‘the Venice of the North’ in a powerful, unforgettable story of love found and lost.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. Since moving to London in 1986 he has written about film and books for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Independent, Daily Telegraph, New York Times and Mail on Sunday. For three years he was the arts editor at Harpers & Queens. Since 1998 he has been film critic of The Independent. In 2006 he was one of the judges of the Man Booker Prize. He is currently wine correspondent for Esquire magazine.

Dalla seconda/terza di copertina:

Summer, 1939. Historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of Liverpool’s architectural past. His mood, like the rest of the country’s, is distracted by the ominous rumblings from Europe; if war should come, will the buildings and streets that he documents survive? Orphaned as a child and now approaching forty with no prospect of a family of his own, Baines is a man emotionally adrift.But his faltering project receives a boost when a photographer, Richard Tanqueray, and his wife Bella befriend him, and together they work against the clock of a rapidly contracting peacetime. A further preoccupation takes hold when he begins to read the long-forgotten journals of a brilliant young Victorian architect, Peter Eames, a disciple of Ruskin who briefly flourished in Liverpool during the 1860s before his fortunes collapsed and his reputation fell into neglect. Through him Baines comes to a fuller understanding of the nature of genius, but also the ambiguous circumstances of a supposedly happy family and the mysterious workings of the human heart. Eames’s own legacy will have unexpected reverberations seventy years later when war comes and Baines joins a Heavy Rescue team, retrieving the wounded from bomb-damaged buildings. With the ordinary rules of life suspended and mortal danger ever present, he finds his courage tested as a rescue man - and his conscience troubled as an adulterous lover. The Rescue Man operates in a restless shuttle between past and present. As one city rises amidst the building boom of the 1860s, the same city in 1940 threatens to fall beneath the terrible devastation of the Blitz. In prose that reflects the dark humour and spiritual dread of the times, Anthony Quinn recreates wartime Liverpool with the same intensity and fidelity he invests in the city of Eames’s Victorian journals. It is a striking double vision of love found and lost, propelling the reader through the streets of “the Venice of the North” towards a wrenching and unforgettable conclusion.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Jonathan Cape
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0224087274
• ISBN 13: 9780224087278
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 320