Historical Romance: Alison MacLeod

Alison MacLeod: This is especially true for historical romance, which has long been this countrys default mode for serious, prize-winning fiction. Alison MacLeod, who was raised in Montreal and Halifax and now lives in England, knows the genre well. Holding firm to the conventions while adding a few twists of its own, her new novel Unexploded which was longlisted for this years Man Booker Prize is a romantic period piece that tells a compelling and complex tale of forbidden love, according to The Star. But while Hitler stares across the Channel, all is not well on the home front. The magic has gone out of the Beaumont marriage. Evelyn is a passionate woman with a keen interest in modern art and modern fiction she particularly admires Virginia Woolf, and even attends one of Woolfs lectures on the new novel . Geoffrey is, well, a banker. He is also colour-blind and is no longer sexually attracted to his wife. But despite these incompatibilities they have settled into a matrimonial routine that they both seem to find some comfort and stability in and Even the highest of highbrow book snobs will confess in unguarded moments to enjoying some favourite flavour of popular fiction, and if you look closely you ll find its often the case that the most critically successful literary novels are crossbred with commercial genres. Formula helps gives these books an extra bit of narrative backbone, and makes them more accessible to a larger audience. The heroine, Evelyn Beaumont, is an upper class British woman married to a very proper bank manager named Geoffrey. The setting is Brighton in 1940-1941, and as the events take place the air is thick with anticipation of a German invasion. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.