Tag archieven: Rosalind Belben

Berlijn, Engelse romans, Engelse schrijfsters, English novel

Rosalind Belben – Is Beauty Good

Rosalind Belben Is Beauty Good review and information of the 1989 novel by the English author. And Other Stories will publish the reissue of the Rosalind Belben novel on July 14, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Rosalind Belben Is Beauty Good reviews and information

Whenever a review of Is Beauty Good, the 1989 Berlin novel written by Rosalind Belben, the English author, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.

  • “Rosalind Belben, in Is Beauty Good, takes the most extreme formal risks with painful elegance . . . Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. She has a photographic eye for natural beauty, and is also tough-minded and funny.” (Maggie Gee, The Observer)
  • “Spare, lucid prose, reminiscent of Woolf’s The Waves.” (Christina Kooning, The Guardian)
  • “A beautiful work… it says a great deal about the world we live in… more life-like and more alive than most fiction.” (Michael Hamburger)

Rosalind Belben Is Beauty Good

Is Beauty Good

  • Author: Rosalind Belben (England)
  • Book type: English novel from 1989
  • Publisher: And Other Stories
  • To be released: July 14, 2026
  • Length: 240 pages
  • Sizes: 13,1 x 19,7 x 15 cm
  • Weight: 164 gram
  • Format: paperback
  • Prize: £14.99
  • Buying Options >

Blurb of the Rosalind Belben Berlin novel from 1989

‘That the music may be polyphonic is no grounds for not listening,’ scribbles a man for his stone-deaf friend. In Is Beauty Good there are many such voices. People talk to various listeners, even to silent ones. They talk to themselves, they resort to handwriting. The inanimate too may be granted a whimsical presence: a child’s tricycle, an antique chest. But, witty and ironic, the novel speaks with one voice of the things that speak, and don’t speak to us: ‘I drank carrot juice, beetroot juice. Disgusting. It seemed undignified, to be so desperate as to drink beetroot juice. Yet people do it without a second thought.’

It begins in Berlin by the Wall. It ends in Berlin – still before 1989 – in the Tiergarten Zoo, to the boom and roar and moan of animals. More often we find ourselves in mountains or an English garden, in the natural world, the loss of which Is Beauty Good so memorably laments.

Rosalind Belben was born on 1 february 1941 in Dorset in the rural southwest of England where she spent her early childhood. From the age of nine she was at boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon. Almost straight from school she went in 1959 to work for the next two years in theatre, meaning to become a writer of stage plays. That didn’t happen. Her subsequent life has been nomadic, her experience and employment varied – with sometimes, nevertheless, years on end passed in a single place. The countryside of Dorset has been both inspiration and recurrent setting. Quite as much, ‘abroad’ has exerted a powerful draw. There have been many adored destinations. Südtirol or the Alto Adige, the German-speaking Alpine region in the north of Italy, from 1978 – or in the 1990s Tunisia, with its myriad Roman and Phoenician remains and Islamic culture. Many epiphanies. In 1987 Belben was in West Berlin as a Fellow of the Artist in Residence Program, staying for fifteen months. New editions of Dreaming of Dead People, Is Beauty Good and Choosing Spectacles are forthcoming from And Other Stories. Among her other novels are The Limit, Hound Music and Our Horses in Egypt, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2007.

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Engelse romans, Engelse schrijfsters

Rosalind Belben – Dreaming of Dead People

Rosalind Belben Dreaming of Dead People recensie, review en informatie Engelse roman uit 1979. Op 5 augustus 2025 verschijnt bij uitgeverij And Other Stories de heruitgave de roman van de uit Engeland afkomstige schrijfster Rosalind Belben die voor het eerst in 1979 verscheen. Hier lees je informatie over de inhoud van de roman, de auteur en over de uitgave. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.

Rosalind Belben Dreaming of Dead People recensie, review en informatie

  • “So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer’s mind.” (Isabel Quigly, Financial Times)
  • “Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature … An achievement to celebrate.” (Maggie Gee, The Observer)
  • “Her heroine is a solitary woman who tells of her past and recalls, often, the countryside, where being alone is not painful and, if there is no meaning to life, the call to the senses is immediate. The book is beautifully written.” (Hilary Baily, The Guardian)
  • “By turns shimmering and disquieting, Belben’s exceptional voice deserves a resurgence.” (Irenosen Okojie)
  • “Deeply strange, uncompromising and extraordinarily powerful.” (Jonathan Buckley)

Rosalind Belben Dreaming of Dead People

Dreaming of Dead People

  • Auteur: Rosalind Belben (Engeland)
  • Soort boek: Engelse roman uit 1979
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: And Other Stories
  • Verschijnt: 5 augustus 2025
  • Omvang: 144 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: paperback / ebook
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van de roman uit 1979 van de Engelse schrijfster Rosalind Belben

In the ‘middle of life’ – although this is only thirty-six – and with the unsparing eye of a portraitist, Lavinia reviews her frustrations and her solitariness, the grief and the rapture: these are her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the medieval masks of Owl, signifying winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. In attendance are dreams of rustic places and once-dear animals. But it is no ordinary procession, for her childhood comes last.

The idiosyncratic Dreaming of Dead People was first published in 1979, yet remains as surprising as ever: it is frank, mordantly funny, true to itself and raw.

Rosalind Belben was born on 1 february 1941 in Dorset in the rural southwest of England where she spent her early childhood. From the age of nine she was at boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon. Almost straight from school she went in 1959 to work for the next two years in theatre, meaning to become a writer of stage plays. That didn’t happen. Her subsequent life has been nomadic, her experience and employment varied – with sometimes, nevertheless, years on end passed in a single place.

The countryside of Dorset has been both inspiration and recurrent setting. Quite as much, ‘abroad’ has exerted a powerful draw. There have been many adored destinations. Südtirol or the Alto Adige, the German-speaking Alpine region in the north of Italy, from 1978 – or in the 1990s Tunisia, with its myriad Roman and Phoenician remains and Islamic culture. Many epiphanies.

In 1987 Belben was in West Berlin as a Fellow of the Artist in Residence Program, staying for fifteen months. New editions of Dreaming of Dead People, Is Beauty Good and Choosing Spectacles are forthcoming from And Other Stories. Among her other novels are The Limit, Hound Music and Our Horses in Egypt, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2007.

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