A beautiful, haunting literary debut from an extraordinary new talent who we can see scooping future literary prizes. When you are the Director of the Creative Writing Course at Oxford University there is, understandably, quite a lot of interest when you decide to write your first novel but Clare Morgan clearly hasn’t let it effect her.
Looking at the lives of two academics through their passions for the philosopher Nietzsche and novelist Virginia Woolf, A Book for All and None, is highly accessible and thought provoking. Why not try the free Opening Extract?
One crisp, clear day, across a cobbled Oxford street, Raymond Greatorex catches sight of Beatrice Kopus. Raymond, a brilliant but ageing don whose specialty is Nietzsche, has withdrawn into a lonely world of scholarship. Beatrice is in Oxford researching Virginia Woolf, and distancing herself from her husband, Walter. When Beatrice reappears in Raymond's life, they embark on a love affair. Beatrice becomes convinced of a link between Friedrich Nietzsche, Louise von Salome - the young Russian emigre who bewitched him - and Virginia Woolf. As Walter faces ruin in his glittering career, Beatrice and Raymond seek refuge in the past. Stories of Nietzsche's madness and his obsession with von Salome become intertwined with those of Raymond's ancestors, and their beautiful, crumbling home on the Welsh borders. But there are even greater mysteries linking the past to the present, and in their quest to find one set of answers, Beatrice and Raymond stand to uncover a secret that will profoundly change their understanding of who they really are.
'a wonderfully constructed edifice; ideas, possibilities, emotions, dreams bounce and echo from one to another, creating a subtle meditation on the limitations of and the potential for love and transcendence' Tim Pears Author of Landed and The House of Fallen Leaves
Author
About Clare Morgan
Clare Morgan is Director of the Master of Studies in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. She gained her MA in Creative Writing from University of East Anglia, where she worked with Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. Her publications include a collection of stories, An Affair of the Heart (Seren, 1996; Dufour Editions, USA 1997). Her stories have been widely anthologised and have been commissioned by BBC Radio 4. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.
