Rose Tremain. A Critical Introduction

What is it about?

Rose Tremain is a popular novelist and an award-winning author. She has published thirteen novels and five collections of short stories to great public acclaim. Her latest novel, The Gustav Sonata, has been published in May. She has won numerous prestigious awards such as the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1992, as well as the prix Fémina Etranger in 1994, for Sacred Country, the Whitbread Novel Award for Music and Silence in 1999, the Orange Prize for The Road Home in 2002. Restoration was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1989. Merivel: A Man of His Time was short-listed for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize in 2012 and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2013. Her short stories have also been distinguished with two of them making the short list of the BBC National Short Story Award: ‘The Ebony Hand’ in 2006 and her latest ‘The American Lover’ in 2014. She has also written radio plays, among which ‘Temporary Shelter’ won the Giles Cooper Award in 1984. This comprehensive chronological introduction offers a detailed analysis of Rose Tremain’s novels and examines the critical reception of her work. It situates Tremain – listed by Granta magazine as one of the twenty most promising young British novelists in 1983 – in the landscape of contemporary British literature by demonstrating how the variety of her work touches upon major concerns of contemporary fiction. The book aims to satisfy the needs of students by providing an extensive reading of Tremain’s novels based on critical discussions of key notions in contemporary literary theory and cultural studies. It includes a comprehensive bibliography and overview of Tremain’s critical reception. It points up the suitability of Tremain’s novels as practical illustrations of major concepts in contemporary literary debates.

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Why is it important?

This is the first comprehensive monograph on Rose Tremain.