A Parish of Rich Women

by James Buchan

Upon his return home from Palestine, Adam Murray feels alienated from British society, but another trip to Palestine convinces him the two societies are much alike

Genres: Fiction

185 pages, Hardcover

First published July 9, 1984

About the author

James Buchan is a Scottish novelist and historian who writes on aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Reviews

[John Fullerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather sorry to have finished this because it's so well written and enjoyable. Cold war spy fiction of a kind, it's a novel of decaying societies, both the English and the Lebanese along with the latter's sectarian hatreds, stoked by former colonial powers and the new thugs on the block, the United States and its client, Israel, in the front row.
A rather nervous young man - too sensitive for his own good, frightened, often in tears - would rather brave the risks, cruelty and awfulness of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon along with the slaughter of Palestinian refugees in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila camps than face the dissolute vacuity and pointlessness of his so-called friends back home.
It's no wonder the author won four major UK literary prizes. He very cleverly binds together past and present, here one moment and there the next, in an almost hallucinogenic and nightmarish way, so that the reader enters the shifting mind and damaged heart of the hero, Adam. This is a short and very individual masterpiece with undertones of Isherwood, Durrell and Waugh. I'm off to find more of Mr Buchan's work.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t read this book in optimal conditions so maybe some of my reaction is my fault, not the book’s. It seems sometimes laconic to the point of opacity (though maybe not to Londoners in 1984) and not possessive of much of a form or plotline per se. Intelligently written, though.