Tenancy

by Eva Figes

(For years the tenants dealt with a landlord who kept within the law - now the landlord has sold the house to a buyer who doesn't. To the hazards of a leaking roof and uncollected rubbish are added more sinister dangers. By the author of Winter Journey, winner of The Guardian Fiction Prize)

Hardcover

First published March 25, 1993

About the author

Eva Figes (born Eva Unger) is a German-born English author.

Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother. Figes is now a resident of north London and the mother of the academic Orlando Figes and writer Kate Figes.

In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall, which included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

Figes's fiction has certain similarities with the writings of Virginia Woolf. The 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have such high hopes for Edith at the beginning, finally free of the torment of an unappreciative, hypercritical mother. But in this gripping story, that takes place largely within the confines of the building, the drip drip of events saps away any chance for any of the tenants. They dwindle away, but not before their spirits are crushed. It seems cataclysmic, but this story resonates even more keenly now, perhaps, than when it was first published. (And as someone with some similar lived experiences, very believable!)