The good republic - Hardcover

William Palmer was born in 1945 and attended schools in England and Wales. After a bewildering variety of jobs he became a full-time writer in 1988. His published books include the novels The Good Republic, Leporello, The Contract, The Pardon of Saint Anne, and The India House; a collection of short stories, Four Last Things, and two collections of poems, The Island Rescue and An Instruction from Madame S. He has just completed Under the Influence, a study of alcohol and its effect on writers' lives and work. His work has appeared in many journals and been broadcast. He reviews regularly for The Independent and Literary Review.

Current events in the Soviet Union make this accomplished, evocative first novel very timely and curiously believable. Jacob Balthus, an elderly London exile who dabbles ineffectually in emigre politics, is invited back to his Baltic homeland, its dreams of liberation suddenly--it seems--at hand. Balthus remembers his Good Republic as "a small place . . . ruled by the good, leading a charmed life . . . between mad giants." But Balthus is a weak man at the center of epochal events, and as the story develops it is clear that he is the one who has led a charmed life while his homeland was raped, first by Germans, then by Russians. Palmer is an established poet and storyteller, and some of his descriptive passages--of a boat trip through the Baltic islets, of a forest bird frozen in its nest--are gems.
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