British Author Challenge February 2022: Mary Renault & Timothy Mo

Mary Renault was born Eileen Mary Challans in 1905. She read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford, receiving her undergraduate degree in 1928. She began training as a nurse in 1933, at which time she met fellow nurse Julie Mullard, who would became Renault's lifelong romantic partner.

She publisher her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939; it and her next five books all had contemporary settings. In 1956 The Last of the Wine was published, the first of her eight historical novels set in ancient Greece.

Renault died of lung cancer in Cape Town, South Africa in 1983.

Works
Purposes of Love
Kind Are Her Answers
The Friendly Young Ladies
Return to Night
North Face
The Charioteer
The Last of the Wine
Theseus Myth series
Alexander Trilogy
The Mask of Apollo
The Praise Singer
The Lion in the Gateway: The Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae
The Nature of Alexander

Timothy Mo was born in Hong in 1950, the son of a British mother and a Hong Kong father. He attended St John's College, Oxford, and worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist.

Mo's novels have received several awards, including a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and an E. M. Forster Award, and he has been thrice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Works
The Monkey King
Sour Sweet
An Insular Possession
The Redundancy of Courage
Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard
Renegade or Halo2
Pure

My February book for this challenge will be The King Must Die by Mary Renault, which coincidentally came up on the kindle bargain sale right when I was investigating choices. I decided it was fate.

The Mask of Apollo by Renault &
An Insular Possession by Mo

for me.

I'm starting with Mo's Sour Sweet and Renault's The Charioteer. I hope to get to The King Must Die, too.

With the intriguing The Mask of Apollo title, I'll choose this one.

The Mask of Apollo proved a memorable journey taken by an actor
who valued a strange old mask.

Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo

This started kind of dry, with disparate parts not looking like they were going to come together, but as characters and plot developed I found myself completely engaged. It's not a book I'll be reading again soon, but I'm glad to have read it and would recommend it to others.

>8 amanda4242: That one does interest me.

>8 amanda4242: I just got Sour Sweet in the mail so I appreciate your comments. I'll be sure to give it a chance to get going.

>9 quondame: & >10 AnneDC: It requires some patience, but I found that it pays off.

Not going to get to this, this month, but maybe later in the year.

I'm taking a short break from The Charioteer. The writing is excellent, but it's heavy stuff and I'm in the mood for something lighter at the moment.

I finished The Charioteer last night and am mightily impressed. The characters are well-drawn, the world has the ring of authenticity, and it doesn't end in tragedy! It does demand careful attention because so often the characters are talking around subjects, but it's more than worth the effort.

I'll have the March thread up later today.

The March thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/339869

US ebook sale: Mary Renault's The Nature of Alexander is on sale for $2.99 today.

https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/the-nature-of-alexander/9781480432949

My March selection was The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham & it was an excellent read - highly recommended!

US ebook sale: Mary Renault's The Persian Boy is on sale for $2.99 today.

https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/the-persian-boy/9781480432376

US ebook sale: The Alexander Trilogy omnibus by Mary Renault is on sale today for $3.99.

https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/The-Novels-of-Alexander-the-Great/9781480433373