Books of the Month April 2024
His Dark Materials Trilogy
The first books on this month’s list is a box set of His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights (1995; published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). Many will have seen the television series produced by HBO/BBC which was broadcast between November 2019 and February 2023.
The story follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The children’s adventures take them across time where they meet witches and armoured bears, fallen angels and soul-eating spectres that destroy the souls of adults to which children are immune, rendering the world empty of adults. The children travel to the land of the dead and in the end, the fate of both the living—and the dead—will rely on them.
This uniformly bound set by the folio society with illustrations by Peter Bailey would make a beautiful addition to any collection.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed “the Astronomer-Poet of Persia”.
This first version of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the best-loved poems in the English language. With its exotic themes and its blend of melancholy and romance, it has seduced readers and inspired artists for many years.
Over the years the Folio Society have produced a number of versions of the poetry, we currently have 3 versions of the book ranging from 1973 – 2012 demonstrating how this book has stood the test of time and still remains ever popular today.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Quiet American by Graham Greene set during the First Indochina War, The Quiet American is narrated by the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, who meets the young idealistic American agent Alden Pyle. The novel’s larger conflict is cantered on the French and American invasion of Vietnam, which is echoed microcosmically in the conflict that arises between Fowler and Pyle when they both fall in love with the same Vietnamese woman, Phuong.
The novel has received much attention due to its prediction of the outcome of the Vietnam War and subsequent American foreign policy since the 1950s. Greene portrays Pyle as so blinded by American exceptionalism that he cannot see the calamities he brings upon the Vietnamese.
The book uses Greene’s experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French Indochina 1951–1954. He was apparently inspired to write The Quiet American during October 1951 while driving back to Saigon from Ben Tre province, accompanied by an American aid worker who lectured him about finding a “third force in Vietnam”
