Your Oxford
Get involved: send your photos, videos, news & views by texting 'OXFORD NEWS' to 80360 or email »
Paperback choice
11:53am Thursday 1st May 2008
Notes From an Exhibition
Patrick Gale (Harper Perennial, £7.99)
The central figure in this family saga with a gay touch is bipolar (manic-depressive) artist Rachel Kelly, who has just died of a heart attack in her Cornish loft-studio. Each chapter is headed by notes from a posthumous retrospective of Rachel's work. We follow her meeting in Oxford with gentle, patient Quaker husband Antony Middleton, who rescued her when she was pregnant and suicidal. He learned never to ask about her family, whom he never met in more than 30 years of marriage. The story unravels gradually, told from the point of view of each of her four children, including gay Hedley and youngest son Petroc, whose death in a road accident at the age of 15 has marked the family almost as deeply as the experience of their wild, unpredictable mother - sometimes loving, sometimes viciously unkind.
The Amnesiac Sam Taylor (Faber, £7.99)
At the beginning of this weird story, James Purdew, is living an ordinary life in Amsterdam with his Dutch girlfriend, but why can't he remember three years when he was a student at an unnamed university town (which seems to be Hull)? What is in the sealed black box under his bed? James embarks on a nightmare journey into his past, becoming obsessed with a 19th-century manuscript entitled Confessions of a Killer. I confess I was still mystified by the end.
Family Romance John Lanchester (Faber, £8.99)
This straightforward account of Lanchester's family history could be subtitled Lies and Whispers. Although he is a novelist, he presents the story factually, contrasting it with the version he learned as a child. Highly recommended to all those who believe theirs is the only family where a seemingly neutral question can be underlayered with a history of rage and emotional violence.
Editor's choice
The Mole and Chicken, Easington, near Thame
One of the pictures on this page gives a good impression of the delights to be enjoyed at the Mole and Chicken on one of those sunny days that now seem as far as can be from our present situation.
Early taste of Christmas wine
Next week is The Oxford Times Wine Club Christmas Tasting and, with just four weeks to go until Christmas Day, it is an excellent opportunity to sample a specially-selected range of wines for the festive season.
Dylan Moran: New Theatre, Oxford
‘I was the first person to discover that if you infected a person with Marmite, he would stand up and bark at the moon.” “Everybody under the age of 35 has the intelligence of raspberry jam.” “Children can hear vegetables hiding.”
Sleeping Beauty, Chipping Norton Theatre
There’s nothing King Couer-de-Loup likes more than a good battle: “We’ll march on King Florizel’s wet and wicked army,” he proclaims. His Queen is not so sure, however. She would rather her husband stayed around: there’s the christening of their daughter Princess Aurora to arrange for a start. And he certainly can’t go out and fight looking like that: “Your chain mail’s got a ladder in it,” she wails.
Local Advertisers
Local Information
Enter your postcode, town or place name
