Limestone and Clay
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Nadia has been here before, at this seeping-away of hope. The other times curl behind her like the petals of a rose, all the memories, all her babies - false alarms, real pregnancies lasting only until her body rejected them.
Meanwhile her boyfriend Simon is underground caving. Nadia knows he risks his life, a decadent death among the limestone, his bones withering in the rock. Her work is to create, to mould leather-hard clay into something beautiful. But she has not the heart for it today.
'Limestone and Clay shows a maturation and deepening of her considerable talents ... Lesley Glaister has produced a portrait of human relationships both disconcerting and haunting in its unflinching clarity' Sunday Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Motherhood, artistic creativity and the mysterious powers of the earth are among the weighty themes tackled in this affecting novel from English author Glaister ( Digging to Australia ). Nadia, a potter, lives with her spelunking boyfriend Simon in an unnamed English town. ``Darkly, strongly female'' though Nadia is, she has never been able to bring a pregnancy to term: memories of a recent, second-trimester miscarriage are overwhelmingly painful. Shortly before Nadia's baby would have been due, Simon thoughtlessly agrees to impregnate his former lover Celia, whose husband is sterile. Nadia is bruised when she hears that breezy, arrogant Celia is pregnant and furious when she discovers that Simon is the unborn child's father. Simon's infidelity proves to be the catalyst for the couple's parallel journeys of self-discovery: while Simon risks his life exploring an unmapped cave on his own, Nadia finds an unexpected way to play at motherhood. Sensational as this plot line may sound, it simply serves as a framework for a meditation on the relations between men and women. Vivid, sensual descriptions of daily life cleverly amplify the narrative's larger events: ``Something about the ordinary process of fishing the wet brown teabag out of the cup, the useless wodge leaking thick brown onto the silver surface of the draining-board, causes her to moan.'' Drawn with exceptional clarity, Glaister's complicated, fallible characters linger in the reader's mind.
