 Hopeful Monsters
Nicholas Mosley Pages: 505
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978 1906011 11 6
Genre: Fiction Date of first publication: 2009
Eland publication date: May 1, 2009
Price: £14.99
Through the dialogue of Max, a young physicist in England and Eleanor, an anthropologist in Germany, Nicholas Mosley resurrects the passion which fuelled the idealism of Europe in the twenties and thirties. The relentless growth of fascism and communism are witnessed by the separated lovers, as their fates take them from civil-war Spain to the merciless purges of Soviet Russia, from the industrial England of the depression to the intellectual maelstrom of middle Europe. This is a vivid and compelling novel, which sets a resonant and deeply moving love story against the birth of a new era, one based on the ideas of Einstein and Freud rather than on the crimes of Hitler and Lenin.
biography of Nicholas Mosley
'Quite simply, the best English novel to have been written since the Second World War'
AN Wilson, Evening Standard
‘A novel of enormous ambition, a book that takes on just about every major idea, every dominant social movement, every significant political event of our time – a virtual intellectual anthology of the 20th century, in fictional form.'
Daniel Stern, New York Times Book Review
The most ambitious English novel written in the past
50 years … an amazing achievement.
Washington Post
A rich panorama of 20th century politics and ideas and an affecting love story, the novel combines the epic sweep and narrative drive of popular fiction and the intellectual authority of the best of Milan Kundera or Saul Bellow.
Newsday
The two things that are extremely impressive about this book are, first, its intellectual energy and rigour and, secondly, Mosley's gift, rivalling Koestler's or Bertrand Russell's, for summarising extremely difficult ideas in an easily intelligible manner.'
Spectator
‘A young English physicist in the 1930s falls in love with a German Jewish anthropologist. The fates draw them together, tear them apart and draw them together again. Between them, they experience the whole mid-20th-century nightmare-tragedy-adventure – the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, the revolution in quantum physics, the challenges to accepted philosophical and religious views. As well as being the ultimate novel of ideas, it is a tremendously moving love story. It should be studied in schools. The ‘hopeful monsters' of the title are those creatures (such as salamanders) that only survive the supposedly relentless processes of evolution by making leaps that buck the evolutionary trend. But we are also monsters who, in spite of the waste of our wraths and sorrows, have something to be hopeful about so long as we retain our capacity to love.'
A. N. Wilson, Reader's Digest
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