Zoe͏̈ Heller Poradie kníh

When New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff falls gravely ill, his wife Audrey uncovers a secret that forces her to re-examine both her belief in him and her commitment to their forty-year marriage. Meanwhile, her ne'er-do-well adopted son, Lenny, is back on drugs again and her daughters, Karla and Rosa, are grappling with their own catastrophes and dilemmas. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary socialist, has found herself increasingly beguiled by the world of Orthodox Judaism; now she is being pressed to make a commitment and must decide if she is really ready to forsake all her cherished secular values for a Torah-observant life. Karla, an unhappily married hospital social worker and union activist, falls into a tumultuous affair with a conservative shopkeeper. Can she really love a man whose politics she reviles? And how to choose between a life of duty and principle and her own happiness?

256pages. in8. Broché. Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them. Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this-it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power-he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons. Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession-and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. -Roz Kaveney

Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a solitary life until Sheba Hart, the new art teacher at St. George's, befriends her. But even as their relationship develops, so too does another: Sheba has begun an illicit affair with an underage male student. When the scandal turns into a media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her friend's defense—and ends up revealing not only Sheba's secrets, but also her own.

Názov i prvé stránky knihy naznačujú, že ústredným motívom bude pikantný škandálik, ktorý rozdúchala miestna tlač po odhalení nedovoleného sexuálneho vzťahu štyridsaťročnej učiteľky Sheby Hartovej so žiakom strednej školy v severnom Londýne. Samozvanou kronikárkou Shebinho príbehu je osamelá stará dievka, učiteľka dejepisu v preddôchodkovom veku, Barbara Covettová. Sheba, atraktívna, láskavá a aristokraticky bezstarostná vzbudí senzáciu, len čo sa na škole St George's zjaví ako nová učiteľka keramiky. Mnohí túžia získať si jej náklonnosť. Barbara sa stáva jej dôvernou priateľkou a domnieva sa, že sa jej naplnila životná túžba: že konečne našla blízkeho človeka a spriaznenú dušu. No keď zistí, že Sheba sa tajne stretáva s pätnásťročným Stevenom Connollym, zmocní sa jej sklamanie, ktoré prerastie v hnev...

Willy Muller's relationships with women are complicated. His girlfriend Penny pushes him to address his personal space issues, while Karen seeks more intimacy. His daughter Sophie wants financial support for her husband's drug habit, but it's his youngest daughter Sadie who is causing him the most stress.