Inge Kok Libros

"Irfan Orga was born into a prosperous family of the old Turkey under the Sultans. His mother was a beauty, married at thirteen, and lived in the total seclusion befitting her class. His grandmother, who also lived in their home, was an eccentric autocrat, determined at all costs to maintain her traditional habits. The 1914 War, however, brought ruin to the family and a transformation to Turkey. The red fez was ousted by the cloth cap, and the family was forced to adapt to an unimaginably impoverished life. In 1941 Irfan Orga arrived in London where, seven years later, he wrote his extraordinary story of his family's survival."--Back cover

In the late 1980s, for reasons even she has difficulty pinpointing, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves her middle-class, close-knit, ribald family in Indiana and enrolls at Ault, an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of, and ultimately a participant in, their rituals and mores, although, as a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider. By the time she's a senior, Lee has found her place at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her hard-won identity within the community is shattered. Lee's experiences, complicated relationships with teachers, intense and sometimes rancorous friendships with other girls, an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush, are both a psychologically astute portrait of one girl's coming-of-age and an embodiment of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.

Verslag van het leven, de liefdes en de literaire ontwikkeling van de Engelse romanschrijfster, waarin zij laat zien hoe nauw verweven geliefde werken als 'De Cazalets' zijn met haar eigen levensverhaal.

De nadagen van het victoriaanse Engeland en de eerste onzekere jaren na het einde van de oorlog vormen de achtergrond van de vierdelige 'Cazalet-kronieken' van Elizabeth Jane Howard, die de periode 1937-1947 omspannen. Deel 1, 'Lichte jaren', begint eind jaren dertig, in de laatste gouden jaren voor het uitbreken van de Tweede Wereldoorlog. In de zomermaanden komen drie generaties van de familie Cazalet bij elkaar op hun familielandgoed vlak buiten Londen. Ze vullen hun dagen met kinderspelletjes in het bos, picknicken op het strand, gin-tonics in de tuin, feestmalen in de eetkamer. Het is een zonovergoten, onbekommerde tijd - maar onder de idyllische oppervlakte broeien er affaires en gefnuikte ambities; en de oorlog werpt zijn schaduw vooruit.