July 1956. Darlington Hall has a new American owner. Lord Darlington is dead, and his butler, Stevens, carries on as he always has.

But change stirs memory, and Stevens will soon begin a journey that will take him out of the house and into recollections of the past, forcing him, for the first time in years, to re-evaluate his life and missed opportunities.

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In this 3-week course we will explore Ishiguro's understated and deceptive novel, reading between the lines and under the surfaces to explore issues of memory and the past, repression and suppression, and unreliable narration.​

Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with Olive Kitteridge. Originally marketed as a novel, the work is in fact a collection of interrelated short stories, many, but not all, featuring the eponymous Olive.

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Ah, Olive! Olive is life in all its beautiful ugly complexity. From afar, ordinary, average, part of the homogeneous centre, Olive is marginalised, strange, a unique individual, when viewed up close. Olive is oh so simple, and yet deliciously complex; she is tender and sensitive, emotionally intelligent and caring… but she’s also an emotionless sledgehammer, an insensitive blunt instrument, seemingly incapable of empathy. She’s funny and spiteful, she’s vulnerable and vindictive, she’s absolutely Olive Kitteridge and she’s every one of us too - and that’s why we love her. 

Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian poet, novelist and film-maker, born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1943. He has published seven novels and a number of poetry collections, and won the Booker Prize in 1992 for his novel, The English Patient.

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Set in Italy during the Second World War, the novel interweaves the stories of four disparate characters as they try to make sense of their broken lives.

The novel addresses questions of identity and character, and the context in which this is judged, as well as issues of race, ownership and boundaries, and the importance of stories.

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Join me for this fascinating 3-week course!