Rosetta Palazzi Books

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marriage, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence ‘Tubby’ Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst. As Tubby’s life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks – via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood – on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment, in an ingenious, hilarious and poignant novel of neuroses.

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and their peers were bound to lose their spiritual innocence and their virginities on the way from the 1950s to the '70s. On the one hand there was the traditional Catholic Church, on the other the siren call of the permissive society. It was inevitable that things would change radically. But how far could it go?

David Lodge's novels have earned comparisons to those of John Updike and Philip Roth and established him as "a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic" ( The New York Times ). Thinks . . . , his witty new novel about secret infidelities and the nature of consciousness, unfolds in the alternating voices of Ralph Messenger, director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, and Helen Reed, a novelist and writer in residence at the university. Mutually attracted, the two end up in a moral standoff that is shattered by events that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph's "we can never know for certain what another person is thinking."