Summary of At Hiruharama

Tanner, Mr. Tanner’s grandfather was an orphan in Stamford, Lincolnshire before he was sent to New Zealand as a servant. There he met Kitty, Mr. Tanner’s grandmother, who was also a servant. They got married, and moved further up north to buy some land and carve out a living. They settled in a quiet piece of countryside called “Hiruharama” and after two years, Kitty told Tanner that she was expecting a child. After consulting with the doctor and getting his assurances and a prescription of medicine, Tanner borrows two racing pigeons from a man named Parrish, in order to contact the doctor in an emergency. However, on the day that Kitty does go into labor, their neighbor, Brinkman, comes around for dinner. Tanner quickly sends off a message to the doctor using the racing-pigeons and begins to help his wife while Brinkman continues to complain about the lack of food. The doctor arrives as soon as Tanner delivered the baby. As the doctor deals with the afterbirth, he realizes that it was a smaller twin and gives it to Tanner. It turns out that the second twin would be the more successful of the two, starting a career in law and hence bringing lawyers into the Tanner family. After that experience, Tanner hung up a tin sign on the wall: “Throw Nothing Away”, just to remind the family how important that philosophy was, especially to them.

Biography of Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Knox Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was born into a bookish family in Lincoln, England. Her father, E.V. Knox, edited Punch magazine from 1932-1949. (Punch is a British satire weekly started in 1841. It coined the term “cartoon” in the modern sense.) Her uncle wrote detective fiction. Her aunt was also a prolific and popular novelist. Penelope’s mother Christina studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, not long after it opened for women. Penelope went to Somerville herself in 1935 and did brilliantly. She co-edited the student newspaper and graduated with a first. After graduation, she worked for the BBC and wrote film reviews for Punch. Her biographer, Hermione Lee, says Penelope had “all the makings of someone who was going to start publishing books in her 30s.” But she didn’t. At 25, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, a former officer with the Irish Guards. She had three children and settled into domestic life. But as Hermione Lee points out, it would be too simplistic to conclude “marriage stopped her writing.”Instead, she incubated every facet of her life and transmuted it into fiction decades later.

Summary and Analysis of The Sandpiper by Ahdaf Soueif

Background/Setting

The setting is the resort town of Alexandria though the city is only mentioned. Action, such as it is, is limited to a beach house or a residence close to a beach. The background to the story to the story is the failing marriage of the European narrator and her Egyptian husband. The story covers just couple of hours of a summer afternoon.

Characters/Characterization

The narrator is caught between two cultures, her husband has drifted from her, yet she is passive though unhappy. There are touches of the neurotic in her. She is in Egypt for summer, Alexandria in fact, but the rest of the time she lives in her “northern land”. But being in familiar environment does not seem to ease things. Her passivity is surprising. She walks without disturbing the sand on the path. Though she has been married for eight years and has come to Alexandria for that many years, she has not learned the language and feels ill at ease. To be sure there is much conflict in the two vastly differing cultures. Women in upper class families did no work in Egypt but she is used to being independent in her country. There is a hint of the husband straying – “On that swirl of amazed and wounded anger when, knowing him as I did, I first sensed that he was pulling away from me, I should have gone”. She is now waiting only for her daughter Lucy to “grow away from me”. Lucy was born in Egypt and is at home there. The narrator senses that Lucy’s need for her is lessening and soon she will be able to make a break.

Biography of Adhaf Soueif

Novelist Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England, where she studied for a Ph.D. at the University of Lancaster. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper (1996), and two novels. In the Eye of the Sun, about a young Egyptian woman's life in Egypt and England, where she goes to study as a postgraduate, set against key events in the history of modern Egypt, was published in 1992. The Map of Love (1999), is the story of a love affair between an Englishwoman and an Egyptian nationalist set in Cairo in 1900, as secrets are uncovered by the woman's great-granddaughter, herself in love with an Egyptian musician living in New York. The Map of Love was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

In 2004, her book of essays, Mezzaterra, was published. Her most recent work is Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012), a personal account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Ahdaf Soueif lives in London and Cairo. She writes regularly for The Guardian and is a key political commentator on Egypt and Palestine. She is the founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, Pal Fest..

Biography of Morris Lurie

Morris Lurie (born 30 October 1938) is an Australian writer of comic novels, short stories, essays, plays, and children's books. His work focuses on the comic mishaps of Jewish-Australian men (often writers) of Lurie's generation, who are invariably jazz fans. Lurie was born in Melbourne, Australia, to Arie and Esther Lurie. His first novel was the comic Rappaport (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966) and focused with a day in the life of a young Melbourne antique dealer and his immature friend Friedlander. The characters, transplanted to London, were further chronicled in Rappaport's Revenge (1973). Lurie's self-exile from Australia to Europe, the UK and Northern Africa provides much of the material for his fiction. His second novel was The London Jungle Adventures of Charlie Hope (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968). Flying Home (1978) was named by the National Book Council as one of the ten best Australian books of the decade. Subsequent novels are Seven Books for Grossman (1983), really a novella parodying the styles of various authors; and Madness (1991), about a writer dealing with a mentally unstable girlfriend. Lurie is best known for his short stories. He recently wrote an instructional guide When and How to Write Short Stories and What They Are (2000). He has been published in many prestigious magazines including The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly, Punch, The Times, The Telegraph Magazine, Transatlantic Review, Island, Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Westerly. A co-worker and friend of Peter Carey, he wrote an early critical review of Carey's first book in Nation Review, November 29, 1974. In November 2006 he was given the Patrick White Award for under-recognised, lifetime achievement in literature

Summary of The Rain horse by Ted Hughes

The short story “The Rain Horse” by Ted Hughes is a story that leaves the reader questioning whether or not these events happened to “The Dude”. After twelve years he returns to the land where he grew up. But twelve years is a long time and no doubt the land has changed as well as him. Because he didn’t want to be viewed as a trespasser by the farmer he traveled the main road. As he’s walking through the mud and rain he spots a black horse. The horse runs strangely over the ridge and disappears. The Dude stares blankly at the barren ridge for awhile then decides to seek some kind of shelter from the rain for awhile. He found a nice spot under some small trees and as he sat there he couldn’t get the picture of the horse out of his head. Then The Dude glances over to the ridge where the horse had disappeared and sure enough it was standing there, staring him down, watching him. He noted that a normal horse would have its head down and eyes drooped. Then the horse charged him and immediately The Dude jumped up and ran as fast as he could. He dove over some brush and tripped, but the horse had disappeared again. Now he had a clear path to the farm, which was just over the hill.

Summary of The Destructors, Graham Greene

“The Destructors” is about a group of teenage boys who call themselves the Wormsley Common gang, after the area where they live. They meet every day in a parking lot near a part of town that was bombed during World War II. Almost everything in this area is destroyed although one house stands with minimal damage. This house is owned by Mr. Thomas (whom the boys call Old Misery), an old man who lives alone. One day, the gang’s leader, Blackie, suggests that they spend the day sneaking free bus rides. T. (whose full name is Trevor) has another idea. He has been inside Mr. Thomas’s house and suggests that the boys take advantage of the old man’s upcoming two-day absence to demolish the house from the inside. T. becomes the gang’s new leader. When the boys meet at the appointed time the next morning, T. has already organized his directions for the boys to demolish the house. By the end of the day, the house is in shambles: the floors are torn up, the fixtures are smashed, the electrical cords are all cut, and doors are destroyed. After everyone but Blackie has left, T. shows him “something special,” Mr. Thomas’s savings of seventy one-pound notes. T. explains that he and Blackie will burn the notes one at a time to celebrate. After they are finished, they go home. The next day, the boys meet again at the house to complete the destruction. They take out the staircase, demolish the inner layers of wall, knock down the floors (it is a multi-story house), and flood what is left. Before they are finished, one of the boys runs in and announces that Mr. Thomas is on his way home. Mr. Thomas was not expected until the next morning, so T. locks him in the outhouse until morning. Not wanting to physically hurt the old man, the boys give him a blanket and food. The next morning, a driver starts up his truck, and as he pulls out of the parking lot adjacent to the house, he hears crashing. At first he is confused, but then he realizes that his truck was tied to a support beam of the gutted house, bringing it down. The driver lets Mr. Thomas out of the outhouse, and although the old man is devastated, the driver cannot stop laughing. He explains that it is not personal, but he thinks it is funny.