published by Jonathan Cape

A young schoolboy’s infatuation with and uncontrollable feelings for his music teacher (and hers for him) and the impact it has on the rest of his life is at the heart of Ian McEwan’s latest book, a tale of sullied yearnings and unrealised hopes scanning one man’s lifetime.

Beginning with his parent’s wartime romance and not especially happy marriage, the book takes us through his boarding school days during the suffocating vestiges of 1950s morality and the embryonic promiscuity of the 1960s. Along the way, it also touches on such burning historic events as the Suez Crisis, the Cuba Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and – even more up to date – the Covid pandemic. Recounted in chronological order, as well as with the occasional flashbacks, it gives the book a raw episodic quality that, at times, makes it feel more like a biography than fiction.

Dropping out of school early. the protagonist leads a life in which he never seems able to connect or realise his true potential. He takes on a number of unpleasant and unremunerative jobs eventually settling for the slightly dead-end job as a lounge pianist. While obviously intelligent and talented, his literary projects don’t quite take off, and his relationships are fragmentary and not always satisfying. In a reversal of the traditional order where it is usually the man who puts his selfish emotional needs first, his first wife abandons him and their infant son to pursue a solitary career as a writer, Later, he has an on/off relationship with a married woman who at first leaves, then returns to and finally leaves her husband. All this is played out against events in the wider world.

Combining quick social observation with a profound understanding of our troubled times, Lessons beautifully captures the warp and weft of our often messy, unfulfilled lives while, at the same time, providing a richly nuanced portrait of a man who suffers his share of abuse and loss while never really achieving his ambitions. Somehow he endures them all and winds up with a measure of peace and understanding at the end.

Published by Struik Nature

The distinguished naturalist, William John Burchell is generally regarded as one of the greatest of the early African explorers. Making up in enthusiasm and tenacity what he then lacked in experience, his bold expedition deep into the South African interior laid the groundwork for much subsequent scientific research and has added considerably to our understanding of the country’s natural history in the nineteenth century. Equipped with a custom-built ox-wagon but none of the expensive equipment which modern science requires he managed to amass an astonishing 63 000 specimens of plants, bulbs, insects, reptiles and mammals on his 7000-kilometre journey which took him through some of the driest parts of the sub-continent, as far north as Kuruman. It is a mark of both his considerable achievements and the esteem in which is still held that so many species still bear his name (Burchell’s Zebra, Burchell’s Coucal etc)

Among Burchell’s many strengths were an indefatigable curiosity and imaginative sympathy with the natural world, coupled with openness towards the people he encountered on his arduous four-year expedition. In this, he was atypical of the day.

Burchell described his outbound trek in his famous Travels in the Interior but never got around to completing the volume describing his return trip via the more lush and densely vegetated eastern coast of South Africa even though it proved every bit as productive and as fruitful in terms of what he discovered as what had gone before. The authors, Roger Stewart and Marion Whitehead, have sought to fill this gap in the narrative by delving back into the records and revisiting many of the places he passed through.

Fortunately, Burchell was a painstaking note-taker and prolific letter writer and this intriguing, well-researched biography is brought to life by the many extracts from his correspondence. In addition, he was also an accomplished artist and his delicate watercolours add immeasurable value and vividness to the text. From downs to mountains, from dunes to semi-desert, they provide a comprehensive microcosm of the country as it appeared back then as seen through the eyes of a highly observant and intrepid young explorer.