Summary
This year we asked Bath Chronicle readers to volunteer to join editor Sam Holliday in reviewing some of the events at the Bath Literature Festival. Here is what they had to say about the events that took place during the first few days of the festival Andrea Levy Andrea Levy brought the richness of her Caribbean heritage to the city that regards Jane Austen as one of its most celebrated residents. Austen barely acknowledged slavery's existence, but the unheard voices of Jamaican slaves are the ones Levy asks us to listen to in her Man Booker shortlisted novel The Long Song.
She spoke of her ancestors and how she created her characters from filling in the gaps between historical descriptions of negroes by white plantation owners and their wives.See the full content of this document
Extract
Literature Festival Reviews
In the nave of the Central United Reformed Church, Levy brought to life the scene where her feisty protagonist July encounters the quadroon Miss Clara and is declared unsuitable to dance with white men because of her darkness of skin. The Long Song describes unutterable cruelty yet has a lightness of touch, a celebration of human spirit, mixing laughter and cunning with the misery of slaves, more resourceful than their downtrodden stereotype previously allowed.
Levy entertained the packed audience, giving hope to late starters by admitting she hadn't read a fiction book right through until her twenties and was even slower in the writing stakes. "I've caught up now," she said and she certainly has.Claire Hayes Kim Edwards I had been longing to meet the American writer, Kim Edwards, since being captivated by her bestselling The Memory Keeper's Daughter several years ago, a profoundly moving story about a twin baby girl born in the 1960s and the consequences of her having Down's Syndrome.She was as I'd expected her to be: warm, modest, accessible and generous and her excellent interviewer, Christopher Cook, allowed her to shine, enchanted as he evidently was by her and her fiction.He talked with her about all her literature before moving on to The Lake of Dreams, her new and second novel, in which a young woman, Lucy, returns from Japan to her childhood home and unravels a web of secrets surrounding her family.Secrets, their impact on her protagonists' behaviour, personality, and the course of their lives, intrigues Edwards.A devastating one lies at the heart of her first novel, and an earlier short story collection is entitled The Secrets of a Fire King. I believe she loves and cares deeply for her characters, with all their failings and mistakes, and she is acutely aware of, and sensitive to, human frailty.Her prose flows gracefully, with imaginative and beautiful imagery: "lilacs and early roses floated in ...See the full content of this document
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