by John Fowles
In The Ebony Tower a young painter and art critic visits a contemporary old master in his Britanny retreat, and is unexpectedly faced with the sexual and intellectual challenge of an extraordinary ménage. The old man's life of passionate selfishness, his courage as a painter, above all his two young mistresses, finally force on the visitor a profound revaluation of himself botri as artist and as human being. In Poor Koko a writer who has suffered a senseless act of vandalism at the hands of an intruder comes to see that it was not he himself; but something much deeper, that was under attack. The baffling disappearance of an apparently happy and successful Member of Parliament, in The Enigma, cannot be solved by traditional police detection techniques; in the end only intuition can breach the mystery. In The Cloud, the central theme---told in the context of one long summer's day--is the bitter isolation of a young and recently widowed Englishwoman staying with her expatriate sister and her family in France. The fifth piece in the collection is Eliduc, John Fowles's lively translation from the French of an early medieval tale of love and self-denial. In this period of literature, he believes, lies the origin of the novel.
Richly satisfying for the ideas they generate and the images they conjure, these novellas are models of the narrator's art--each one a journey in which the travelling is as much a pleasure as the arrival itself Also by John Fowles THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN This is splendid, lucid, profoundly satisfying piece of art, a book which I want, almost immediately, to read again.'
--New Statesman 'He takes up the Victorian novel itself and twists it round to attack its own world. The result is a brilliant success... It is a passionate piece of writing as well as an immaculate example of story telling.'
--Financial Times THE MAGUS 'A remarkable piece of work... the narrative skill and power of invention, the sense conveyed of an obsession having been wrung dry to the last drop of titillating juice, must command our admiration.'
--The Times 'The Magus is a deliciously toothsome celebration of wanton story-telling--immensely seductive and brilliantly entertaining.'
--Sunday Times THE COLLECTOR 'A haunting and memorable book.'
--The Times Literary Supplement 'A writer who, with a single book, establishes himself as an artist of great imaginative power... More, important than its brilliant account of a psychopathic obsession is its statement about the condition of attachment.'
--Sunday Times