Start reading Counting the Stars on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.

Deliver to your Kindle or other device

 
 
 

Try it free

Sample the beginning of this book for free

Deliver to your Kindle or other device

Read books on your computer or other mobile devices with our FREE Kindle Reading Apps.
Counting the Stars
 
 
Share your own customer images

Counting the Stars [Kindle Edition]

Helen Dunmore (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews) |
Print List Price: £14.95
Kindle Price: £6.49 includes VAT* & free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
You Save: £8.46 (57%)
Unlike print books, digital books are subject to VAT.
This price was set by the publisher

Formats

 Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition £6.49   -- --
Hardcover, Large Print £20.95   -- --
Paperback, Large Print £14.95   -- --
Audio, Cassette, Audiobook --   -- --

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Product Description

Product Description

In the sticky summer heat unruly desires stir the blood . . .

For Catullus, the brilliantly witty and outrageous young poet, and Clodia, his older, married lover, a borrowed villa in Rome is a secret, illicit meeting-place. When they are apart, Catullus burns with desire for 'his girl', while Clodia goes her own way among his rivals. Other passions simmer in the heat: the streets threaten to erupt in political violence, hearts sour and contemplate murder, and love and hate are dangerously entwined. Catullus' jealousy grows as toxic as hellebore or hemlock. Poisoning is a Roman art, and there is poison everywhere ...

From the Inside Flap

'She reels you in with a return to the seductive, flowing prose that has made all her novels...so memorable...Dunmore has a gift for turning every genre she touches to gold...a captivating tale of forbidden love with a bittersweet finale' Telegraph

`Dunmore at her most innovative and daring...a powerful and convincing study of fame and notoriety...captivating and compelling' Time Out

`Compelling...Dunmore's strengths as a novelist have always included her skill in sensuous description and her ability to convey the promises and the dangers of erotic love. The Rome she has so vividly realised in Counting the Stars provides a new stage on which to display those strengths' Sunday Times

See all Product Description

Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 350 KB
  • Print Length: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (26 Feb 2009)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B002RI9B3K
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #155,270 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

    •  Would you like to give feedback on images?

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?

› Explore similar items

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
 
(3)
(2)
(1)
(1)
(1)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

Customer Reviews

5 star
0
2 star
0
1 star
0
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
By A. Craig HALL OF FAME TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
Everyone who has done A-level Latin has probably been intrigued by Catullus, and his passionate affair with "Lesbia", an older married woman, immortalised in some of the best poetry ever written about love. Like Shakespeare's Sonnets they tell a story which is that of everyone who has ever felt seared by love, and loss, but which is also tantalisingly individual and modern. Dunmore imagines the progress of the affair, from the time when Catullus and the rich, spoilt Clodia (probably the real-life Lesbia) make love in the villa of his friend Manlius, through to when he returns to Rome after his brother's death in Bithynia and realises the affair is over. Interwoven with this is a kind of detective story as Catullus discovers that Clodia may have poisoned her husband. A dull upstanding Senator very different from the glamorous, witty, sophisticated circle Caullus inhabits, he is blamed for the death of Lesbia's famous sparrow.

Dunmore has always excelled at haunting, lyrical descriptions of doomed passion in which the central protagonist is doomed or deceived. There are two striking things about this new novelhowever. One is that it has a male point of view throughout. The other is that it is often very funny. As a noted poet herself, she probably puts a lot of her own frustrations at bores and philistines into C's mind; Clodia's leaden husband is allowed more dignity and sympathy in the end but makes a good foil. She also allows us to sympathise with Clodia/Lesbia, especially in her choice not to remarry. What fate could a Roman girl have but to be married off at 14? If Clodia is puzzlingly sex-mad, maybe it's the only sphere in which she can achieve some autonomy.

Ultimately, this isn't quite as good as her best novels, The Siege and Talking to the Dead in terms of narrative control and satisfaction. It's a more internalised drama, without the shocks and surprises that make her earlier work particularly satisfying. However, it's one of her best historical novels, a hugely impressive work of imagination and research. A pleasure to read, it will stay in your mind long after the end.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
By Roman Clodia TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
Catullus, a poet writing in C1st Rome bce, the Rome of Cicero and Julius Caesar, is perhaps now best known for his searing poems written to `Lesbia', possibly the aristocratic married woman Clodia Metelli. Dunsmore takes this scenario very literally and spins a story that fills out the gaps in Catullus' own poems. Love, death, obsessive erotic passion, poisoning, possible incest and political corruption: this ought to be a story boiling over with emotion, but somehow it feels emotionally flat, both too sensationalist and yet too mundane at the same time.

Dunsmore writes in an odd kind of half-historical style: some of it is completely contemporary so that Catullus talks about his `career options', people imagine going to heaven (in pre-Christian Rome?), people talking to and about slaves as if they are social acquaintances. Yet, on the other hand, she stresses the alieness of Roman culture, particularly around a funeral scene. Sadly, for me, neither style worked, and the book ended up being un-atmospheric to an extreme.

I also found Dunsmore's extremely literal reading of Catullus' poetry very limiting, as if the only source for poetry is always and unquestionably the autobiographical, with no room for creative imagination at all. Apart from being an unsophisticated reading, it made the whole book far too predictable to anyone familiar with the poetry itself.

There have been other attempts to novelise the Catullus/Lesbia story (Clodia, The Venus Throw, The Ides of March ) but this is the first time it has been written by a woman. However Dunsmore doesn't succeed, in my view, in making Clodia any more a coherent `real' woman than any of her male writers.

So overall I found this a disappointingly slight book that gestures towards something deeply emotional but fails to deliver.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Interesting read 14 July 2008
Format:Hardcover
I've enjoyed all Helen Dunmore's books to date - including the children's books, and I liked 'Counting the Stars' too. This book was beautifully written and full of brooding emotion like all her storytelling, however, the plot didn't really grab me and there was a chapter or two in the middle I was tempted to skip. Still, a fascinating read if you like a story set in classical Rome and are a fan of Helen Dunmore's work.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums

Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject









i.e., each title must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Amazon Media EU S.à r.l. GB Privacy Statement Amazon Media EU S.à r.l. GB Delivery Information Amazon Media EU S.à r.l. GB Returns & Exchanges