A woman tries to uncover the mysterious fate of a friend in Cambodia in this “very smart” and suspenseful novel (The New York Times Book Review).
Liz Headleand is one of London’s best-known and most prominent psychiatrists. One day she arrives at work to find a mysterious package, postmarked from Cambodia. Inside, she finds various scraps of paper, a laundry bill from a Bangkok hotel, old newspaper clippings—and pieces of human finger bones.
Shocked but intrigued, she realizes the papers belong to her old friend Stephen Cox, a playwright who moved to Cambodia to work on a script about the Khmer Rouge. Convinced Stephen is trying to send her some sort of message, Liz follows the clues in the box to the jungles of Cambodia, risking her life to find her friend.
In this thrilling novel, Margaret Drabble continues the trilogy she began in The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity, taking us far from the civilized, familiar streets of London, and painting an “urgent, brilliant” portrait of the tumultuous, terror-ridden landscape of Cambodia in the late twentieth century (The Boston Globe).
“A tour de force.” —Calgary Herald
“Unputdownable . . . A sojourn within The Gates of Ivory is not something one soon forgets.” —Edmonton Journal
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 1, 2013 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780544286900
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780544286900
- File size: 1310 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 4, 1992
``Why impose the story line of individual fate upon a story which is at least in part to do with numbers?'' asks Drabble in the middle of her follow-up to The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity. Instead of developing a conventional plot, the author casts a tone of irony (as sympathetic as it is subtle) over the daily affairs of Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen and Esther Breuer, the heroines of the previous novels, and synchronizes these with the efforts of Liz's friend Stephen Cox to make art from the unfathomable political holocausts in Cambodia--and with Liz's attempt to locate a vanished Stephen. As if underscoring her development of a form that ``offers not a grain of comfort or repose'' even as it engrosses the reader, Drabble reintroduces characters from The Needle's Eye only to declare that ``they have wandered into this story from the old-fashioned, Freudian, psychological novel, and they cannot mix and mingle.'' What seem mutually exclusive goals are realized: the characters are clear and compelling, objects of particular scrutiny; and the horrors of history are not trivialized by transposition to a tidily wrapped narrative. Drabble's achievement commands awe even as her subject matter rouses immeasurable stores of pity and terror. -
May 3, 1993
Instead of developing a conventional plot, Drabble's brilliant follow-up to The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity casts a tone of sympathetic irony over the daily affairs of her heroines.
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