Paul W. B.’s Comments (group member since Feb 26, 2025)

Paul W. B.’s comments from the Classics Without All the Class group.

‘Making A Moveable Feast’ is based on true events in 1920’s Paris in the Jazz Age.
Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/y9azrzr4

Despite many biographies, histories and reminisces of the Lost Generation, until now there hasn’t been a novel bringing to life those early day to day conversations of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway finding their feet, over their first four months in Paris in 1922. ‘Making A Moveable Feast’ is meticulously researched to piece together the daily events of that romantic Parisian Springtime time after WWI.

Hadley grew in confidence, after suffering the depression of cruel family bereavements, into a recognised classical pianist playing to French society, led by Natalie Clifford Barney. Gertrude Stein gives Hemingway lessons to transform his writing into a unique style that changed modern prose. This book shows how.

Hadley and Hemingway became friends with Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare & Company bookshop, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Mildred Aldrich, Picasso and many more visionary artists and writers.
Scattered throughout are symbols of Hera, the Greek goddess of female strength (peacock, pomegranate, crown, cuckoos) and to keep readers on their toes there are also coy references to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
For the first time, daily conversations in 1922 between the great writers are created. This is a fresh novel, led by the women of the era, from meticulous research of recorded events and testimonies. It leans on dialogue that will resonate with the emotions of readers. Making A Moveable Feast taps into popular desire for more knowledge of those magical Parisian days, one hundred years ago.

My new George Orwell novel, Darkness in 1984, is out now on Amazon.

Based on true events.

‘Darkness in 1984’ available from Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/4twzftfr

Christmas 1945 - George Orwell, recently widowed, arrives with his baby son to stay with his friend Arthur Koestler at a remote cottage, Bwlch Ocyn, in North Wales.

Orwell has just published ‘Animal Farm’ and mulls ideas with Koestler for his next novel. Koestler had written the acclaimed novel, ‘Darkness at Noon,’ about the Stalin show trials and also spent time in a Nazi prison. Both Orwell and Koestler supported the Republican government during the civil war in Spain and were dedicated to democratic Left causes.

Here for the first time are their imagined conversations in wintry Wales, based on true events, which produced one of the 20th Century’s greatest and darkest books, ‘1984.’

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jwuH...