Riassunto:
It is December 1979. Kathleen's son Sean has been convicted of a crime on behalf of the IRA and sent to Long Kesh prison - newly renamed the Maze. John Dunn has just taken up a job as a prison guard after leaving the army. Both will be shocked at what they find. Both will try to do the right thing, and fail. Neither will ever be the same again. Louise Dean's sensational new novel deals with one of the most explosive and morally complex incidents in recent British history. THIS HUMAN SEASON is a powerful, confronting, humane, and blackly funny examination of the lives of ordinary people when placed in the vice of history.
Recensione:
'[Dean] pulls off the smutty mess-room banter of the "screws" as convincingly as the fag-fuelled kitchen-table gossip of Kathleen and her sister. But it's not just the dialogue that is spot on. The novel is pinned to its era as much by the details as by historical events . . . Dean is an audacious arrival in British fiction. She is unafraid to tackle unsexy or unsafe material, or to stray beyond the domestic sphere. With the difficult second novel, so often a disappointment, she has significantly upped the stakes and succeeded. Where THIS HUMAN SEASON could easily have been earnest or preachy it is funny and humane. And -- most refreshing of all -- Dean is only noticeable in her narratives by her conspicuous absence. We will undoubtedly be hearing more from her' THE GUARDIAN 14/05
'THIS HUMAN SEASON - a meticulously researched, fictionalised account of late 1970s clashes in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison - is sure to establish Dean as a heavyweight talent' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
With clear-eyed compassion, and with all the resources of the novelist's art, Louise Dean leads us through those terrible days when for a while Belfast was the vortex for the worst of the world's cruelty and pain.
M Coetzee
'This is a fine and thoughtful historical novel, which manages to find humour and decency in the most awful of places' SUNDAY TIMES 31/04
'This Human Season is a novel that confirms the arrival of a significant voice in British fiction' THE OBSERVER 31/04
'This Human Season has none of the clunky antitheses and over-simplifications that bedevil most Troubles fiction. Its characterisation and dialogue are solid and smooth, its sudden blasts of violence chilling, its empathy profound. Dean has thought herself into a stranger's history and understood its effects' THE SCOTSMAN 31/04
This Human Season by Louise Dean
This Human Season is so remarkable. That an English woman born after the Troubles began should take on one of its most grisly episodes - the 'dirty protests' in the Maze prison - as a focus of a compelling family drama is ambitious to say the least. That she should pull it off with such compassion and perceptive detail is nothing short of astonishing' Telegraph 7/05
‘Astonishing fiction’ Arena June Issue
'Masterly' The Sunday Telegraph 15/05
'Dean is brave enough to offer the reader a glimpse of a real hope, held hopelessly between funeral and tragedy. She is also an eloquent architect of strengths and shapes of passion, and remarkable in her harshly lyrical delineations of the lives of women and girls . . . Ranging across this huge landscape is a novel which captures a community's resilience and its humour full of broken glass. Louise Dean describes the exact glint of this spirit' TLS 12/05
'Utterly compelling, it's a compassionate tale of belief and survival and a great way into Irish politics' EVE 06/05
'A Stirring tale of life in Belfast during the torrid year of 1979 . . . Louise Dean delivers gloriously' THE LIST 04/05
''"A real page-turner" said David Robson in The Sunday Telegraph. Dean's even-handed approach to politics is "as refreshing as it is unexpected", while the ending "hints at the possibility of redemptive love amid all the hatred and despair". In this "fine and thoughtful novel", Dean finds "humour and decency in the most awful of places", said Lucy Hughes-Hallet in The Sunday Times, and reminds readers that, in any conflict, the enemy is not "a hideous horde", but a collection of individuals. THE WEEK
'Dean looked to a situation strangle-held by tribal hatreds but has been sufficiently shrewd and humane not to offer any easy answers in a convincing narrative that is honest and stylistically unpretentious' IRISH TIMES 04/06
'Dean writes with great skill and empathy' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'The powerful story of two people on different sides of the Northern Irish conflict' SUNDAY TIMES SUMMER READING 9/7
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