The Circle

Synopsis

‘Feinstein’s triumph is to write so well that she makes Lena’s predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful … [she has] an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.’ Guardian Lena’s seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

Author Biography

Elaine Feinstein was born in Liverpool, brought up in Leicester, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. Since 1980 she has lived as a full-time writer. In the same year, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She has written fourteen novels, many radio plays and television dramas, and five biographies. She has travelled extensively; for the British Council in France, Spain, Italy, Rumania, India, and South East Asia and in Russia for GB/USSR. She has been invited to read her work at festivals in Cheltenham, Edinburgh, Charleston, Ledbury and Dartington; and at international events in Toronto, Paris, Milan, Rome, Jerusalem, Adelaide, New York, Wellington and others. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her novels and biographies have been translated into many languages, and her poems have been widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of All the Russias was published in 2005, and her latest book of poems, Talking to the Dead, came out in March 2007. She received a major Arts Council award for her book, The Russian Jerusalem. This is a phantasmagoric journey through the Hell of Stalin’s Russia, with Marina Tsvetaeva as her imaginary Virgil. It is framed by her own travels in the Soviet Union and the new republics of Russia and the Ukraine. In 2007 she was elected to the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.