The Last September - Elizabeth Bowen

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Résumé :
Set in 1920s Ireland during the waning days of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, The Last September unfolds in the elegant but fading world of Danielstown, a country estate caught between leisure and looming unrest. Nineteen-year-old Lois Farquar, visiting her aunt and uncle, drifts through languid tennis parties, garden teas, and quiet flirtations-while outside the gates, Ireland's War of Independence draws ever closer. Elizabeth Bowen's prose is luminous and piercing, capturing the fragile beauty of a society obliviously poised on the brink of collapse. Both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of political and social twilight, the novel is as much about the inner tremors of desire, identity, and belonging as it is about the seismic historical shifts reshaping the world beyond the lawns....

Biographie:
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist celebrated for her precise, lyrical prose and her keen psychological insight. Born in Dublin and raised partly in County Cork, she drew deeply on the landscapes, houses, and tensions of Ireland in her early fiction, while later works often explored the moral and emotional upheavals of wartime London. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Bowen produced acclaimed novels such as The Heat of the Day and The Death of the Heart, as well as finely crafted short stories. A chronicler of shifting worlds-whether the fading Anglo-Irish gentry or the fragile civility of a city under siege-Bowen combined elegance and wit with a sharp sense of the undercurrents shaping human lives....

Sommaire:
Set in 1920s Ireland during the waning days of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, The Last September unfolds in the elegant but fading world of Danielstown, a country estate caught between leisure and looming unrest. Nineteen-year-old Lois Farquar, visiting her aunt and uncle, drifts through languid tennis parties, garden teas, and quiet flirtations-while outside the gates, Ireland's War of Independence draws ever closer. Elizabeth Bowen's prose is luminous and piercing, capturing the fragile beauty of a society obliviously poised on the brink of collapse. Both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of political and social twilight, the novel is as much about the inner tremors of desire, identity, and belonging as it is about the seismic historical shifts reshaping the world beyond the lawns....