#ST_AUBIN_DE_TERAN_Lisa

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An Unofficial Rose

Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose

(nine people, all looking for love; nine intertwined, entangled lives)

Lure of the Exotic

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast  (tired of US civilisation, man takes family "back to nature" in Ecuadorian jungle)

Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest  (young couple, psychically "lost", seek solace on magical, sinister tropical island)

Patrick White, Voss  (explorers "find" themselves by trekking across Australia; at home in Sydney, girl waits breathlessly for news)

Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot  (widow seeks happiness by surrendering to impulse, going on haphazard Far Eastern odyssey)

Rosamond Lehmann, A Sea-Grape Tree  (deserted wife seeks spiritual and psychic reassurance on Caribbean island)

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits  (Trueba family women, over four generations, order their lives by magic, fantasy and psychic communion rather than as their patriarch ordains)

Searching for Self

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse  (thoughts and memories of large close family on holiday: projected day-trip to a lighthouse focuses each of their lives)

Lisa St Aubin de Terán, The Bay of Silence  (apparently happy, successful film actress haunted by schizophrenia)

Christopher Isherwood, A Meeting By the River  (two brothers, extranged and "lost", find Buddhism, true love and tranquility of soul)

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf  (lonely middle-aged recluse "rehabilitated" spiritually by three mystical, possibly fantasy young people)

Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth/Cefalù  (group of tourists enter Cretan labyrinth in search of psychic identity - and each quest is unexpectedly fulfilled)

Eleanor Dark, Return to Coolami  (four people motoring in Australian outback discover themselves)

Women Alone

Jenny Diski, Rainforest  (professor tries to stop intellectual meticuluosness destroying emotional life)

Anita Brookner, A Misalliance  (divorced woman, keeping up facade of busy, fulfilled existence, is troubled by chaotic emotional life of people she meets)

Bernice Rubens, Our Father  (archeologist"s meeting with God in Sahara triggers a search of her past and the relationship between her charismatic, enigmatic parents)

Susan Hill, In the Springtime of the Year  (young widow "rehabilitated" from grief by calm rhythms of country life)

Jane Gardam, Crusoe"s Daughter  (Robinson Crusoe gives lonely woman purpose in life and grasp on sanity)

D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel  (case-history of disturbed woman, erotic and violent, reflects nightmarish psychic experience of all 20th-century humanity)