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Zusatztext "Jonathan Raban's achievements in this novel are nothing short of awesome." -- The Washington Post "Raban has a wonderful gift...These characters seem to index an entire civilization." -- The Village Voice Literary Supplement "Raban is a first-rate observer! with an eye for the ridiculous and a gift for the sudden pounce." -- Newsday Informationen zum Autor Jonathan Raban Klappentext From Jonathan Raban, the award--winning author of Bad Land and Passage to Juneau , comes this quirky and insightful story of what can happen when one can and does go home again. For the past thirty years, George Grey has been a ship bunker in the fictional west African nation of Montedor, but now he's returning home to England-to a daughter who's a famous author he barely knows, to a peculiar new friend who back in the sixties was one of England's more famous singers, and to the long and empty days of retirement during which he's easy prey to the melancholy of memories, all the more acute since the woman he loves is still back in Africa. Witty, charming and masterly crafted, Foreign Land is an exquisitely moving tale of awkward relationships and quiet redemption. Leseprobe CHAPTER ONE It was a shadowless London morning; a grudged measure of twilight between darknesses. They breakfasted under a bare 150-watt bulb. Sheila worked her passage through a plate of All Bran, Tom drank coffee from a mug with a thick and warty glaze. The window of the tall room at the back of the house showed a lawn of fallen plane leaves, a clogged birdbath, a torn fence, and then the city, lying far below them like a lake. It was thunderously still and black. Sheila held her father's letter, a single sheet of onionskin. "He's coming back. For good, he says." Tom was staring at the stamp on the envelope. There was a flag, with some gaudy Third World heraldry on it, a sword, a fishing boat, a torch, some sort of tree. "Great," Tom said, losing the word in his beard. He went on looking at the stamp. Then, "Why?" "What do you mean, why? He's sixty." "I thought he might be ill. Or something." "Oh, he isn't coming here. He'll go to my gran's old house in Cornwall. That's why he kept it on." "Is that a baobab tree, do you reckon?" "I've no idea. Probably. I suppose that's what they have out there.'' "Is that what you want?" Tom said. "I don't see that it really makes much difference. London to Cornwall is as far in time as London to Bom Porto." "Bom Porto," Tom said with a faint snuffle. It was difficult for anyone to pronounce the name of the place where her father lived as if they meant it seriously. At least his transfer to St Cadix would solve that problem. "It's his deathbed repentance. It has to be a wrong move. He can't know England any more. It's a foreign country. What'll he do here? He's got some chocolate-boxy picture in his head of spreading elms and village pubs and thatch with everything. Poor old bugger." "Perhaps he's just fed up with the heat." Sheila laughed. Tom, surprised, smiled at pleasing her so easily. "Yes, that's what this country's for. It's a place where people come to cool off." Tom watched her, his lips moving slightly behind his Mr Rat whiskers. He got up from the breakfast table that he'd carpentered when he first moved in. Sitting at it, feeling its bare grain under her fingertips, she felt soothed by its weightiness. "Do you want me to go to the shops first? Or fix the van?" "Shops," she said. "Okay," said Tom. His extraordinary specific gravity made the room seem to float as he left it. Sheila carried her mail up to the study at the top of the house. It was a room too small for Tom. He always stopped at the doorway unless he'd come to re...
