Man Booker prize shortlist

Knowledge Of Angels

'A compelling medieval fable, written from the heart and melded to a driving narrative which never once loses its tremendous pace'

'An irresistible blend of intellect and passion'

'This remarkable novel resembles an illuminated manuscript mapped with angels and mountains and signposts, an allegory for today and yesterday too. A beautiful, unsettling moral fiction about virtue and intolerance'

'Remarkable...Utterly absorbing...richly detailed and finely imagined'

'The lucidity of Jill Paton Walsh's style and the dexerity of the narrative are such that her book reads more like a good thriller than a weighty novel of ideas...An ingenious fable'

Jill Paton Walsh was educated at St Michael's Convent, North Finchley, and at St Anne's College, Oxford.  She is the author of several highly praised adult novels: Lapsing,  A School For Lovers,  Knowledge of Angels, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, Goldengrove Unleaving, The Serpentine Cave and A Desert in Bohemia.  She has also won many awards for her children's literature, including the Whitbread Prize, the Universe Prize and the Smarties Award.  She has three children and lives in Cambridge.

It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment. 
 
But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death...

The Serpentine Cave

A haunting novel of loss, self-discovery and redemption.

Jill Paton Walsh was educated at St Michael's Convent, North Finchley, and at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author of several highly praised adult novels: Lapsing, A School For Lovers, Knowledge of Angels, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, Goldengrove Unleaving, The Serpentine Cave and A Desert in Bohemia. She has also won many awards for her children's literature, including the Whitbread Prize, the Universe Prize and the Smarties Award. She has three children and lives in Cambridge.

When Marion's mother is silenced, first by a stroke, and then by death, she is left confronting the chaotic detritus of a life obsessively devoted to art. she has left it too late to ask the crucial questions about scenes confusedly remembered from her childhood, and above all about the identity of her own father, 'lost in the war'. Out of the hundreds of paintings in her mother's studio, one, a portrait of a young man, is inscribed 'For Marion'. Is this her father? And who was he? 
 
Marion's search takes her to the Cornish town of St Ives. In the remote and closeknit town where communities of fisherfolk and artists have coexisted for many years, she learns of a tragedy which is intrinsically tied up with her father's life. Over fifty years before, the St Ives lifeboat went down with all hands bar one. Marion must delve deep into the past to discover the identity of a man she never knew,a nd in so doing confront the demons which have tortured her own adult life. 
 
The Serpentine Cave is an imagined story containing a true one - a powerful novel about memory and loss, birth and rebirth, and past regrets which still have the power to plague the present.

Jill Paton Walsh

'Immensely powerful...a broad sweep of a book'

'Sinuously evocative...Masterfully told...Immensely ambitious, yet also immensely moving, A Desert in Bohemia deserves to follow Walsh's last novel, Knowledge of Angels, on to the Booker shortlist'

'A shimmering, fabulous story...Tragic, convincing, moving, this is a novel whose richness, complexity and, ultimately, optimism make the heart

'A moving, gripping, ultimately optimistic, and intensely satisfying novel. Beautifully constructed and written...wonderful'

'Structurally and thematically ambitious...serious, yet enchanting'

'A gripping story...she succeeds in conveying the intimate pain of the lies and betrayals that took root at the heart of people's lives during decades of oppression'

It is 1945. Somewhere in Central Europe, in the aftermath of violence and confusion, a terrified and bloodstained young woman, Eliska, emerges from the forest to take refuge in an apparently abandoned castle. Soon she is joined by others - the idealistic Jiri, the sinister Slavomir and his partisans, and Count Michael Blansky, who is the castle's ancestral owner. 
 
But the war has changed things for ever. In a storm of ideological change, the existing order and the aristocratic heritage of ten generations are brushed aside by the arrival of Communism, and Count Michael must join the flood of refugees if he is to survive. He leaves behind a legacy which will entangle those involved for the next forty years in more ways than they can possibly imagine. 
 
As divided post-war Europe unravels around them, they must make what they can of lives buffeted by circumstance. For many, individual freedom is at best problematic. For better or worse, communities are destroyed, families uprooted, and the ties of trust, friendship and duty which bind them together are broken down by the implacably irresolvable forces at work. Told through the eyes of nine characters who live through the forty years between the end of the war and the fall of Communism, A Desert in Bohemia is a complex and enthralling testament to the power and powerlessness of the individual in challenging times.

Jill Paton Walsh

Praise for A Desert In Bohemia

'Immensely powerful...a broad sweep of a book'

'Sinuously evocative...Masterfully told...Immensely ambitious, yet also immensely moving, A Desert in Bohemia deserves to follow Walsh's last novel, Knowledge of Angels, on to the Booker shortlist'

'A shimmering, fabulous story...Tragic, convincing, moving, this is a novel whose richness, complexity and, ultimately, optimism make the heart

'Immensely powerful...a broad sweep of a book'

'Sinuously evocative...Masterfully told...Immensely ambitious, yet also immensely moving, A Desert in Bohemia deserves to follow Walsh's last novel, Knowledge of Angels, on to the Booker shortlist'

'A shimmering, fabulous story...Tragic, convincing, moving, this is a novel whose richness, complexity and, ultimately, optimism make the heart

'Immensely powerful...a broad sweep of a book'

'Sinuously evocative...Masterfully told...Immensely ambitious, yet also immensely moving, A Desert in Bohemia deserves to follow Walsh's last novel, Knowledge of Angels, on to the Booker shortlist'

'A shimmering, fabulous story...Tragic, convincing, moving, this is a novel whose richness, complexity and, ultimately, optimism make the heart

Books by Jill Paton Walsh

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