From the acclaimed author of Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds Without Wings comes an intimate new novel, a love story at once raw and sweetly funny, wry and heartbreakingly sad.
He’s Chris: bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. In his forties, he’s a stranger inside the youth culture of London in the late 1970s, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a hooker into his car.
She’s Roza: Yugoslavian, recently moved to London, the daughter of one of Tito’s partisans. She’s in her twenties but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And although she’s not a hooker, when she’s propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway.
Over the next months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. She’s a fast-talking, wily Scheherazade, saving her own life by telling it to Chris. And he takes in her tales as if they were oxygen in an otherwise airless world. But is Roza telling the truth? Does Chris hear the stories through the filter of his own need? Does it even matter?
This deeply moving novel of their unlikely love–narrated both in the moment and in recollection, each of their voices deftly realized–is also a brilliantly subtle commentary on storytelling: its seductions and powers, and its ultimately unavoidable dangers.


From the Compact Disc edition.

The Girl on the Street Corner

I am not the sort of man who goes to prostitutes.

Well, I suppose that every man would say that. People would disbelieve it just because you felt you had to say it. It's a self-defeating statement. If I had any sense I'd delete it and start again, but I'm thinking, "My wife's dead, my daughter's in New Zealand, I'm in bad health, and I'm past caring, and who's paying any attention? And in any case, it's true."

I did know someone who admitted it, though. He was a Dutchman who'd done it with a prostitute during his national service. He was in Amsterdam and he was suffering from blue balls at a time when he was on leave and had a little money in his pocket. He said she was a real stunner, and the sex was better than he had expected. However, the woman kept a bin by her bedside, the kind that is like a miniature dustbin, with a lid. You can still get them in novelty shops. Anyway, after he'd finished he eased off the condom, and she reached out and lifted the lid off for him out of good manners. It was packed to the brim with used condoms, like a great cake of pink and brown rubber. He was so horrified by that bin of limp milky condoms that he never went to a prostitute again. Mind you, I haven't seen him for twenty years, so he may well have succumbed by now. He liked to tell that story because he was an artist, and probably felt he had a Bohemian duty to be a little bit outrageous. I expect he was hoping I'd be shocked, because I am only a suburbanite.

I tried to go with a prostitute just once in my life, and it didn't work out as I had expected. It wasn't a case of blue balls so much as a case of loneliness. It was an impulse, I suppose. My wife was alive back then, but the trouble is that sooner or later, at best, your wife turns into your sister. At worst she becomes your enemy, and sets herself up as the principal obstacle to your happiness. Mine had obtained everything she wanted, so she couldn't see any reason to bother with me any more. All the delights with which she had drawn me in were progressively withdrawn, until there was nothing left for me but responsibilities and a life sentence. I don't think that most women understand the nature of a man's sexual drive. They don't realise that for a man it isn't just something quite nice that's occasionally optional, like flower arranging. I tried talking to my wife about it several times, but she always reacted with impatience or blank incomprehension, as if I was an importunate alien freshly arrived from a parallel universe. I never could decide whether she was being heartless or stupid, or just plain cynical. It didn't make any difference. You could just see her thinking to herself, "This isn't my problem." She was one of those insipid Englishwomen with skimmed milk in her veins, and she was perfectly content to be like that. When we married I had no idea that she would turn out to have all the passion and fire of a codfish, because she took the trouble to put on a good show until she thought it was safe not to have to bother any more. Then she settled in perpetuity in front of the television, knitting overtight stripy jumpers. She became more and more ashen-faced and inert. She reminded me of a great loaf of white bread, plumped down on the sofa in its cellophane wrapping. Englishmen don't like to talk about their troubles, but I've had enough conversations with other men like me, usually at a bar somewhere, usually trying to delay their homecoming, and always reading between the lines, to know how many of us get clamped into that claustrophobic dreary celibacy that stifles the flame in- side them. They get angry and lonely and melancholy, and that's...

 

To call A PARTISAN'S DAUGHTER simply a love story might discourage the wider interest it deserves. It is, rather, a meditation on the search for love in a weary world--graphic, profound, affecting, yet so plainly written and transparently narrated that the characters live and breathe and feel, and persist in memory. The book's language and structure are ideally suited to audio. The work is made up entirely of stories within stories, smaller in scope and far more intimate than the author's well-known bestseller, CORELLI'S MANDOLIN Spoken by a man and a woman, alternating between the two fine voices of Sian Thomas and Jeff Rawle, the work strikes the listener as a spontaneous outpouring of two lives. One can't help becoming emotionally involved. Too soon over, its subtle mysteries laid bare, this haunting recording invites the listener to start again. If only the characters could. J.L.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

 

"A wise and moving novel, perfectly accomplished. It shines fresh light on the nature of love . . . Like Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, A Partisan's Daughter is a novel about missed opportunities and wrong paths taken, tracing the way in which one false move can alter the history of a life . . . A glory."

 

"How do you follow up Corelli's Mandolin, one of the most successful British novels of all time? . . . A Partisan's Daughter, although also revolving around politics, history and romance, is very much a departure. Yet it is a triumph--a finely-executed little masterpiece."

 

"Although Scheherazade may be the most famous damsel ever to delay her fate by spinning out nightly yarns of fantasy and intrigue, Roza, de Bernières's captivating temptress, is equally gifted in the art of storytelling . . . A provocative and artful analyst of the human psyche, de Bernières vividly celebrates the tantalizing strength of stories to transform individual lives through their eternal and universal appeal."

 

"Gripping . . . De Bernières's mellifluent, clear prose slips through the reader's mind with efficient ease, and even at its most dramatically jarring, you never need to come up for air. This is de Bernières's skill, and it is a considerable one."

 

"Vintage de Bernières . . . The author, like Roza, knows how to construct a captivating narrative, and A Partisan's Daughter is a graceful, persuasive exploration of boundless storytelling and the limits of love."

 

"An attractive and completely compelling story about the power of narrative."

 

"In A Partisan's Daughter, his urgent, spare new novel of romantic obsession, Louis de Bernières, proficient at intricate historical narratives, shows himself an artist of the simpler story as well. Not that simple means easy. If prostitution, as so often is said, is the oldest profession, then writing about fallen women must be the oldest literary subject. To make that subject hit its mark requires a new spin. For de Bernières, it's the smoldering repression suffered by a melancholy London salesman."

 

"De Bernières is a skilful writer, poetic but unforced, who can soothe you like a masseur, telling well-oiled stories of past excitements, and then just when you are drifting off, dexterously tweak a pressure point."

 

A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières
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