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Loading... The Dark Circle (original 2016; edition 2016)by Linda Grant (Author)
Work InformationThe Dark Circle by Linda Grant (2016)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) LisaBergin | Apr 12, 2023 |   ) adzebill | Aug 15, 2021 | Lenny and Miriam, 19 year old twins of Jewish parents are just achieving independence and looking forward to their futures when they are diagnosed with tuberculosis. They are sent off to the South of England to a sanatorium for treatment. They like others before them soon become institutionalised. They are exposed to a different set of people and their lives are permanently altered and affected. I wanted to like this more but really failed to feel any connection to the individuals in this story even though the setting was an important one to learn about. I felt more empathy with their aging characters, one disappointing scene aside. ( ) HelenBaker | Jul 11, 2017 |  ) SulfurDog | Apr 13, 2017 | ) charl08 | Nov 27, 2016 |
 Grant’s take on sanatorium life is a far cry from Mann’s The Magic Mountain or its romanticised ilk, and this makes for refreshingly original reading. Her characters are bored, hacking their lungs up, undergoing painful and debilitating procedures, and scared of dying. Grant brings this cloistered world vividly to life, its pains and pleasures equally heightened....silently enriching what’s already an astonishingly good period piece. ...This mars the overall effect, but luckily it doesn’t detract from the power of the bulk of the narrative.  linda Grant’s exhilaratingly good new novel is set in postwar London, scarred with bombsites and grey with austerity, where East End twins Lenny and Miriam Lynskey are bright emblems of the life force...From Dickens to Camus to Solzhenitsyn, disease and cure (along with their institutions and instruments) have been so well used as metaphors that careful handling by Grant of the enclosed world of the sanatorium is imperative, if it is not to seem stale. But she is far too subtle a novelist to miss this, and from the outset The Dark Circle dispels such anxieties. This is a novel whose engine is flesh and blood, not cold ideas: my single quibble is about the use of such a gloomy title for a book so drenched in colour and light. ... Grant brings the 1950s – that odd, downbeat, fertile decade between war and sexual liberation – into sharp, bright, heartbreaking focus.
The Second World War is over, a new decade is beginning but for an East End teenage brother and sister living on the edge of the law, life has been suspended. Sent away to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kent to learn the way of the patient, they find themselves in the company of army and air force officers, a car salesman, a young university graduate, a mysterious German woman, a member of the aristocracy and an American merchant seaman. They discover that a cure is tantalisingly just out of reach and only by inciting wholesale rebellion can freedom be snatched. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.52)
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