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Unexploded

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Unexploded

By: Alison MacLeod
Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
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About this listen

Brighton, May 1940. A time of tension and change. Geoffrey Beaumont becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp on the edge of town, his son Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton his English HQ, and his wife Evelyn meets Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish painter imprisoned in the camp. As love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, the lives of Evelyn, Otto, and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.

Longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2013

©2013 Alison MacLeod (P)2013 W F Howes Ltd Fiction Historical Fiction Romance War

Critic reviews

"MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised" ( Metro)
"Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling" (Helen Dunmore)
All stars
Most relevant
This story could almost be the negative frame of JoJo Rabbit. Any redemption is hard to anticipate and long awaited. As folk of Brighton anticipate the imminent landing of Hitler on the beaches and, rather than the Blitz spirit, the sickening creep of middle-class fascism takes hold of innocent minds.
The nuances of a mature complex marriage are explored with subtlety and wisdom, as are the flawed characters of the main characters.
The novel’s denouement is arrived at fraught with stomach clenching tension and the author achieves a not unsurprising ending without sentimentality or melodrama.
The narrator has a good voice but the editing lets her down by including several errors of phrasing and a mistaken mid-sentence pause. It’s a pity to be distracted by such things.

Beautifully rendered tale

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Alison Macleod is an outstanding writer with many talents. Wide ranging imagination, infinite capacity for research, flowing prose etc etc. The best thing about this book is the fascinating non-fiction research - Brighton threatened with invasion during WW2. The rest is indulgent make believe. I'm sorry to sound harsh, but Tenderness by comparison is a masterwork and I'm disappointed.

SPOILER ALERT; In this sorry tale in which 2 schoolboys get away with a crime that isn't even addressed inthe end, the author overeggs the pudding with all of her talents and the result is a sickly mess. Particularly early on, far too detailed drawn out descriptions try the patience - do we need to know about the taste of pus in Geoffrey's mouth? - I almost shouted aloud, yes Alison, you are good at description but no more pus, blue skies and seagulls, or the sea eagles that stand as metaphors near the end of your book, please. The final chapters string cliche after cliche as the central characters move inevitably into one another's embrace. What a pity Evelyn or Geoffrey didn't take the green pill instead of Otto.

The simpering narrator (who was great in Tenderness) doesn't help. Her almost lah-di-dah diction an echo of the ghastly Evelyn.
Like me listening, I suspect that she hardly believed a word of a lot of what she was reading.

Not even a tiny patch on Tenderness

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